WW SSB Contest 2012

It has been a fabulous conditions on the bands this week end. Not much activity on CW made me watch around the WW SSB Contest.

For several years, I haven't heard all of the SSB portion of 15m has been full with contesters on Sunday morning. 10m was also very active with the contesters spreading up to 28650KHz. This might mean we are on the height of the sun spot cycle. On 40m, I barely heard any East Coasts. It might be a coincidence or not but I have heard only very few calls known to me.

In Japan, there were pretty many guys in the contest. But again there were only few I knew. A remarkable change was that there were very few university clubs participating it. So far as I heard, only JA3YBK and JA7YAA were pretty active. Of course, because I have listened the bands only for limited time, there should be the others in it whom I have not accidentally heard. It has been some years since I heard JA7YAA last time. It was an unexpected pleasure for me. The university clubs used to be very active in major contests and was a cradle for new comers in ham radio in Japan. It is important that the clubs are activated for whatever.

There were much activity from China and Indonesia. Chinese operators were mostly not experiened in contesting. But in a few years, they would be a big party making world top score. It sounded they had had difficulty to work with NA, especially, East Coast. The window opens only for a short while, I know from the experience of operation as XU0JA in 1991. Is it a rainy season in SE Asia? There should be a lot of static noise over there as well.

Feeling a bit sad that there were only very few familiar calls in the contest, I still gave a dozen of them a call and my number on 40m before switching off the gear.