September/October 2000 NCJ

Table 1The approximate total time spent oneach band during the two “nightshift” periods (0000 to 1000Z) bythese contest operations.ZF1A J6DX J6DX’94 ’93 ’96160 meters 5 hrs 1 hr 1 hr80 meters 2 hrs 4 hrs 5 hrs40 meters 7 hrs 13 hrs 14 hrs20 meters 6 hrs 2 hrs 0 hrsers, 1,020 3-pointers and 132 multipliersfor 576K. Forty meters contributed1,186 2-pointers, 1566 3-pointers and133 multipliers for 940K. Thus 40 meterswas still the best band to be on at night.It’s interesting to note that both bandshad similar percentages of 3-pointersand multipliers—the volume of Qs on 40meters made the difference.For an even higher SSN, I looked atthe 8P9Z CQWW CW multi-single resultsof November 1999 (the SSN wasjust above 100). They only spent abouthalf of both nights on 40—that’s lessthan the J6DX efforts and our ZF1A1997 effort at low SSN, indicating that20 meters may indeed be trying to musclein on 40 meters during the night at highSSN. Thanks to Dan, K1TO (8P9Z teammember and one of the two foundingfathers of the Cayman Maiden PlumSociety), for this data.All this is fine and good if you’re in theCaribbean, but what about stateside operations?Is 40 meters still the best bandduring the night? I again used MINIPROPPLUS 2.5 to briefly look at propagationfrom W9 to Europe and Japan.Sure enough, 40 meters is the placeto be. This also seems to hold for otherparts of the US and Canada, as well.As a side note, a bunch of us did amulti-single effort as K9LA fromK9UWA’s QTH for CQWW CW last year.I volunteered for the night shift for bothnights. Looking back at the breakdownsheet shows I spent too much time on 20meters, and not enough on 40 meters.Hmmm, what my wife Vicky, KB5EAM,says about me may be true—you reallycan’t teach an old dog new tricks.In summary, if you’re going to put in aserious DX contest effort, one of the criticalitems is to make sure you have a majorpresence on 40 meters during the nighttimehours. If you’re going on a contestDXpedition, this could even mean doingwhat the C6AJX team (K7AR, N7NU,W7RR and WJ7R) did for their CQWWCW effort last year—they took a 2-element40-meter beam with them. ■36