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CQWW 2000

CQ WW Contest 2000, as SM0/4S7AB from SK0UX Multi Multi

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Article Summary

The CQ World Wide contest 2000 was held on 28th and 29th October 2000. This is said to be the biggest among all the contests. Maybe because, it has the highest number of participants as well as the highest number of awards in various categories.

Article Highlights

Kamal Edirisinghe
4S7AB / KA5MAL

Author Sep 2022

Having More than 35 years of experience in the Field of Amateur Radio, I have published many articles in prestigious international publications like, QST, CQ-DL, NCJ, Six-News etc.. Here in this web site, these write-ups are intended to give you knowledge about my designs and projects related to the hobby. The articles about foreign HAM activities are intended to share my experience.

I had an opportunity to operate CQ WW as SM0/4S7AB from the club station SK0UX in Stockholm, Sweden on Saturday 28th October 2000. This was the first time to operate in CQ WW. All my equipment were provided by Henryk SM0JHF. I was able to do a total of 200 QSOs on 20m including some Dx countries like Japan, Australia, USA & Canada and Argentina. It was a very sucessful operation having the main intention of getting the experience.

The new experience….

All the bands were fully occupied. No place to park your CQ call. If one wants to see the QRM at it’s maximum, he/she should operate the CQ WW from Europe. The weak signals are hard to pick up. The stronger station always wins. I cannot understand how the QRP stations can survive & enjoy CQ WW under these conditions. But that’s the way it is…

I had no intention of ‘winning’ the contest with my long callsign and the limited number of hours I could afford to have. Callsign had to be repeated several times under the severe QRM conditions to do a single contact. On the other hand, both the LIDs and the most polite operators can be found at the same time in a contest like this.

The Fun part…..

Henryk SM0JHF not only provided equipment and transport, but also food. He is an expert when it comes to cooking. One may think that the contest is all about eating. Anyhow…it is not easy to handle two pileups at the same time….. Another interesting thing was to contact stations from Europe whom I have contacted from home before.

The weather and the propagation

The weather was not so good during the contest day. Raining continued throughout the whole day. Around 7.00 pm , snow started falling down into this mountain radio station. It was ‘so’ cold outside.  Around 1400 UTC, there was a good opening to Japan and Australia. Around 1530 UTC, Canada and USA started coming strongly on 20m. European stations were always there to ‘increase’ the count.