I decided to give CQWW CW a go, despite being a complete noob when it comes to CW. At the current speed of 10-15 wpm I’m completely useless in a contest like this, but with a little help from skimmer software I managed to secure a few.

Or, at least, that was the plan.

Prior to the contest I replaced all my RG58 going to the EFHW antenna with proper RG213, and started off with high hopes. For some odd reason, I got tons of RF in the shack. If I exceeded 30 or 40 watts over a period of time, the FT-950 would call it quits and power off, as a self defence precaution to protect itself. Fair enough.

At first I thought the length of the coax was the problem, but this wasn’t just for a single band. It was for every band I TX’d on.

Adding clip-on ferrite beads helped a little, but not much. Power was limited to about 50 watts, give or take.

All in all I settled with 123 QSOs with low power, and was lucky enough to catch some contacts in North-America and even one in Hawaii on 20m.

I’ll be better prepared next time.