2019: CQWW CW From Madeira

I decided on a low key effort for CQWW CW in November 2019. On our previous visit to Madeira, earlier in the year, I spied an AirBnB cottage in a great location near the village of Santa, not far from Porto Moniz on the north-west coast of the island. I booked the cottage for CQWW- Janet and I returned in November, this time with my radio kit and antennas.

There wasn't much space for antennas at the cottage so I opted for a single band entry on 20m, taking a couple of fibreglass poles (10m and 12m long) plus plenty of coax, wire and ferrite rings. I was fortunate to receive help from a Portuguese ham who helped me get the short-call CR3S for the contest weekend.

Equipment I took with me: Elecraft K3 transceiver (with sub-receiver), Expert SPE 1.3k amplifier, logging with DXLog and Win4K3Suite by VA2FQ for a panadapter. Prior to the contest I operated as CT9/G4IRN; it was at this stage I discovered 20m was very noisy with local electrical noise, so I checked out the other bands. 40m was also noisy but 15m was much quieter, so I decided to do a 15m single band entry for the contest.

Propagation was fair - I didn't hear any far eastern (Japan, Thailand, Malaysia etc) stations but runs into Europe and the US were excellent.

After the contest I visited the CR3DX contest station - Janet spotted their antennas when we were driving around town before the contest - about 10 minutes walk from my QTH.