CQ World Wide DX Contest CW 2021 from Thailand

CQ World Wide DX CW Contest is one of the oldest and most anticipated CW contests in the world. This contest, supported by CQ Magazine in the US, is held annually in the last weekend of November and draws together a crowd of over 35,000 HAM stations from all over the world, all competing for a top prize in their respective categories.

For Thailand and Southeast Asia, CQ WW CW is an extremely popular contest and many stations do indeed participate in this 48-hour marathon. For E2A team, after having the station at E21EIC already set up a month ago for the CQ WW SSB contest, we carried on operating under the same Multi Operator Single Transmitter category (M/S) with the same ops including E24OYI, E25KAE, E29TGW, E20NKB and E21EIC. One major improvement we did make for CW is the installation of RX antennas by HS3NBR and E21EIC for 80m and 160m. These two beverage antennas were beamed at 330° and 30° for stations in the EU, and JA as well as W6 and W7, respectively.

The contest started at 07:00am Thai time (00:00UTC) on Saturday 27th November 2021. We beamed our antenna in the Northeast direction for contacts with JAs, interspersed with stations from the West Coast and Canada on 20m band. For the multi station, we spent the first 30 mins on 40m band working South America and the Caribbeans, before switching to 15m band.

Our E2A team managed to reach the target set for the number of QSOs, with more than 1,000 QSOs made within the first 10 hours of operation, and 1,860 QSOs after 24 hours to round off our first day of the contest.

Other stations joining in the CQ WW DX Contest in CW mode from Thailand include:

•Single Operators
E20XMG, E21AOY, E21YDP, E29AHU, E2X (op E20GMY), HS0ZDY, HS0ZLN, HS0ZME, HS1NIV, HS2JQC, HS2UPR, HS3LSE, HS4MLV, HS5NMF, HS5ZLD, HS8JWH, HS8JYX, HS8KAY and HS8KGG

•Multi-Single Low Power
HS8NKB (ops HS8NKB HS8HEX)

Another team worth mentioning is 9M2A (Ops: 9M2ZAK 9M2LAN 9W2RUT 9M2TDX 9M2FUL 9M2YDX 9M2SAL) from our neighbouring country, Malaysia, who entered under Multi Operator Multi Transmitter category, and managed to score over 1.5 million points raw score from Zone 28.

E2A continued to operate as planned with no breaks with the 5 operators that we had. Because the E2A team is stationed within Bangkok with a city noise of S7 to S9, this severely rendered our ability to copy any signals on the 80m and 160m bands. We relied heavily on our RX antennas during the contest which had helped tremendously, allowing us to make a handful of QSOs in the low bands to a fairly satisfactory level given the circumstances.

Overall, the propagation during the contest was quite reasonable. On 40m, we were able to work the East Coast which is extremely difficult for Thailand. Some of the stations include K1LZ, K1ZZ, KV2K, K3LR, and NA3M. We managed to snag these tough ones from faraway countries also: FY5KE, P44W, KP2M, NP4Z, PJ2T, PJ4K, and XE2S.

The reception on the 20m band was not very good in comparison to the openings on 15m. On the 20m band, we managed to work the East Coast including K1LZ, K1ZZ, KC1XX, K1JB, N1DG, N1BUG, NE1B, W1RM, W1GQ, W2MV, W2FU, K3LR and W3LPL, as well as these rarer ones 9Z4Y, HC2AO, OA4SS, TI7W (op N6MJ), HQ9X, V31MA, VE2IM, KP2M, NP4Z, WP3C, P44W, PJ2T, PJ4A, ZF1A, and ZF5T.

The propagation on 15m band was good with particular openings to Europe and stations from South Africa and the Caribbeans can be heard quite clearly, however we were not able to receive any stations from the East Coast. Some of the stations worked include 3B8M, 5Z4VJ, 9J2BO, 9X4X, XE2CQ, XQ1KZ, PYs and LUs. V31MA came blaring in the final 10mins of the contest and was easily logged.

The propagation on 10m band was quite disappointing considering how active it was for SSB just a month earlier. We mainly logged stations within Asia and Japan, and some big guns in the EU every now and then.

After 48 hours, our E2A team crossed the line with a total of 3,436 QSOs and scoring just above 4 million points raw score. In addition, we managed to log these 3 stations on all 6 bands (10, 15, 20, 40, 80, 160m): UA4M, RM9A and RW0A. Throughout the contest, we were focused and determined to achieve the highest score in Asia as a team and must congratulate JA7ZFN (Ops: JH7XMO JG7PSJ JI7GBI JP7DKQ JA1CTB) who managed to score over 6 million points under the same M/S team category.

Lastly, a special congratulations to YC9FAR from Bali, Indonesia, who has just received her plaque for winning 1st Place in Oceania, Single Op 15m band, in the All Asian DX Contest – CW 2020, organized by JARL.