2017: Suriname (PZ5V)

QTH: PZ5RA Rental Shack, Paramaribo, Suriname.

QRA: GJ25jq

CQ Zone: 9

Latitude: 5° 40′ North, Longitude 55° 14′ West

PZ5V was operated by members of the Voodoo Contest Group from Sunday 19th November to Tuesday 28th November 2017, during which time the group entered the CQ World Wide DX CW contest.

AA7A - Ned Sterans

G4FON - Ray Burlingame-Goff

G4IRN - John Warburton

KY7M - Lee Finkel

Team Support: John Arthurs K7WP

QSL Manager: Tim Beaumont M0URX

Rigs: Three Elecraft K3s plus three 1KW amplifiers

Antennas:

• Mosley PRO-67_C (30-10) @ 20m
• Mosley PRO-67_B (40-10) @ 22m
• Inverted-V dipole for 80m @ 20m apex
• 1/4 Wave vertical for 80m with 28 full size radials
• T-antenna for 160m, top @ 18m between the towers
• Beverage antennas on NA and EU

Claimed Score: 9,407 QSOs; 158 zones; 574 countries = 20.1 Million

We set up two run stations, with Run-2 working 40m and 15m whilst Run-1 was used on 160, 80, 20 and 10m with the yagi fed through a bi-plexer so that 20 and 10 could be used on either the mult station or Run-1. The 160/80 antennas were on various switches to allow operation between Run-1 or Mult. In practice it worked very well though of course we had to be very wary of the 8 band changes per hour rule.

Equipment was 3 x Elecraft K3s with 1kw amps and logging with N1MM+. Although we were ‘assisted’ the internet was only available for about half the contest but at least we didn’t get any power cuts.

With four ops, planning the operating rota was nice and easy; we scheduled reasonable sleep breaks and any non-operating hours where we weren’t operating were spent looking for multipliers on the mult station, or prompting Run-1 to QSY.

The South American Caribbean stations and the M/2 stations in North Africa have a distinct advantage over us in terms of proximity to the 3 point population masses. Last year we scored 18.6 Million from 8,810 QSOs and came 5th in world; we realised that to move up a position we needed to shoot for 20 Million and hope those other guys didn’t improve their scores either. With 10m in such bad shape we would be relying on the low bands and sure enough the 80m vertical came to our rescue.