2026 ARRL DX SSB - HD8R¶
Another one for the books… and maybe one of the best ones I can remember.
ARRL DX SSB is one of my favorite contests to be on the DX side. That's why I didn't hesitate for a second when my friends from the HC8 project offered me the chance to operate SOAB HP from HD8R, while they would do M/2 from LP1H. I stayed the two weeks after the CW leg, waiting for the long-awaited moment.
The Operation¶
- Callsign: HD8R
- Operator: LU9ESD
- Category: Single-Op All Band, High Power (SO2R)
- QTH: Galápagos (South America)
- Operating time: 44:40 hours
- Club: Araucaria DX Group
Pre-Contest Tests¶
I used those days before the contest to do some radio testing, some other testing with a DHDL, and a few tests with RX antennas, although in the end none of them gave better results than the 170-meter (560 ft) Beverage that I ended up using on pretty much every band. I lost count of how many times I went out to check and repair that Bev, because my friends the cows really don't like wires crossing their territory.
During those days I also took the chance to add some USB foot pedals to each PC as a quick way to switch between the main antenna and the Beverage on each radio. Since I don't have a Maestro or any kind of Stream Deck, doing it with the mouse is way too slow. This way I had four pedals at my feet, and I felt like Brian May…
I also had some time to test the Flex 6600 and the K4D side by side. I had been thinking about getting rid of one of the Flex radios and wanted to hear the difference on receive — if there really was one. Honestly, in the little time I tested them I didn't notice any meaningful difference in favor of either one. Also, to fit the K4 into the setup, I had to build a custom cable to tell the Antenna Genius what band it was on, and unfortunately I didn't have those connectors available. Next time one of the run radios will definitely be the K4D, at least to get rid of one of the biggest problems the Flex gives me, which is the TX audio delay — something that really does not go hand in hand with contest speed.
The AC Unit Drama¶
During the week before the contest, the air conditioners we had bought on the mainland were supposed to arrive, and a local technician had agreed to install them on Monday. But as happens quite often on the island, Monday turned into Tuesday, Tuesday into Wednesday, and the AC units still were not arriving because of some issue with the airline company that brings cargo into Galápagos.
The deadline for that installation was Thursday, because Friday was not going to exist for me — I was going to dedicate it only to resting as much as I could. But the news I got on Thursday around noon was that the AC units would be ready to be picked up at 3 p.m. and that the installation could be done on Friday. At first I said no — that I wanted to rest, and that with all the noise involved in that kind of work it would be impossible. But then I remembered last year's ARRL and all the contests I'd already done from there with 30 °C and 80% humidity in the shack — that was not pleasant at all. So I changed my mind. Helped by the fact that the property has three floors, I moved down to the ground floor and maybe the noise from the second floor would not bother me as much.
Late Thursday afternoon the technician came to drop off the air conditioners, we agreed on where they would be installed, and I asked him what I needed to move so he would not have to wake me up in the morning. One of them was going exactly where the filters and amplifiers were, so I started disconnecting everything and making room.
That night I stayed up finishing some last details in the setup, adding some ferrites to the MK2R+ audio cables which for some reason pick up a bit of RFI when transmitting on the other radio — something that only happens to me with this setup and not with other radios. I decided to go back to using N1MM for a visual reason: I can make the letters in the entry window really big and maybe improve my error rate that way. Between all those things, it got to 3 a.m. on Friday, and already very tired, I went to sleep in that room far away from the ground floor.
Around 8 a.m. the noise woke me up, but I already had my AirPods nearby, and some soft music with noise canceling on made the annoying sounds disappear and I managed to fall asleep again. I woke up exactly at noon. Six hours to go before the contest started.
The noise was still going. After a shower and a light breakfast/lunch, which would be my last meal until Sunday, I went up to the shack. It looked like a war zone. Even though I had covered the equipment area with plastic, there was dust everywhere, and the work was still going on. At that point they were already working on the electrical wiring. The indoor and outdoor units were already installed, but the electrical panel was exactly where I had to put the filters back.
Only at 3 p.m. local time (21z) did they ask me to shut the power off so they could make the connections for the new breakers, and by 3:30 I was ready to reinstall the filters and amplifiers. For the first time I started to feel cool, dry air in that room — maybe the first time since it was built. The comfort I was going to gain with that job made the dust and the last-minute work worth it.
A Dead Laptop and a Borrowed PC¶
Once I connected everything back and cleaned up what I could, I sat down at the operating position ready to power everything up. 22:15 UTC.
I powered up both radios, both PCs, the Antenna Genius power supply and the filter fans, turned on the 8600 and the 6600, the MK2R for audio switching — but wait a second: why is one screen not on? My laptop for Radio 1 was on, but the Dell for Radio 2 was not. What's going on?
"Maybe I just need to hit the power button one more time…" Nothing.
"Could it be that I unplugged the power supply?" "Hmm, no, it's plugged in."
"I'll plug it into another outlet, this one probably doesn't work." Nothing.
"But I shut it down properly last night, it shouldn't have run out of battery."
One of the two laptops I had at the station was completely dead. No spare. 22:45z.
While the AC technician was trying to get a taxi to come pick him up, I was already taking the back cover off that laptop. Looking for information, I found that with Dell laptops you have to hold the power button for 40 seconds to reset the energy management. Nothing. I disconnected the internal battery, tried with charger only. Held the button for 40 seconds, 60, 30, 48… Nothing. The death certificate was signed at 22:55 UTC.
By that point I had already called David, our host's son, to ask if he had a computer he could lend me — but no luck.
OK then. This is as far as my plan to compete with two radios goes. I'll be limited to one radio and whatever has to happen will happen. After all, I'm here to have fun, and I've said many times already that with our "POTA antennas" we cannot pretend to be competitive against the big stations.
Fabián, the technician who installed the AC units, finally managed to get his taxi and said he was leaving. "Fabián, let me ask you something: any chance you have a laptop or some kind of computer you could lend me?"
"Hmm, yes, I do have one. It's almost new. Not very powerful, but maybe it'll work. I can bring it tomorrow."
"That's great Fabián! You could save my contest! But I need it within the next 30 minutes!" 😅
We talked to the taxi driver and they left immediately for town without loading anything Fabián had to take back — we would load it on the way back.
About half an hour later Moisés arrived in his taxi-pickup with a Dell laptop and its power supply. We threw Fabián's stuff in the back, I paid for both rides, and off he went.
23:30 UTC. Time to run. 🏃🏃🏃
I started installing SmartSDR, AG Utility, and a couple of other things I needed. Windows 11 would not allow the installation because of that damn Core Isolation. Disable the option, uninstall and reinstall. The PC, with only 8 GB of RAM and an i3 processor, was not helping with the speed the situation required. Once everything was ready, with SmartSDR running and SmartCAT feeding the radio to the logger on PC1, it was already 23:50 UTC.
So then — what band do I start on?
The Contest: A Bad Opening Choice¶
I went to 10 meters and of course it was on fire. Maybe it was going to be too much of a pileup to put together a fast first hour like what happened to me the year before? I went to 15 and there weren't that many people there, so I chose to find a frequency on 20 meters and stay there, always remembering that first hour on 20 m with 439 QSOs from 6Y1V in CQWW SSB 2023.
Big mistake.
When I started the contest with 4 Qs/minute in the first few minutes, I realized I had screwed it up. Right then I also remembered the auto-spot thing: how the hell do you turn on auto-spot in N1MM? There was no way I could find it. I had to grab my phone and start looking it up.
When at the 8-minute mark I made only 2 QSOs in that minute, I decided to move to 10 meters, where I could see all the action on the waterfall of R2. Up until then I had not even thought about calling on two bands, because I was trying to prioritize a rate that never showed up.
On the second CQ on 10 the pileup appeared, although nothing even close to the start of this same contest the year before when we did M/2. The first 10 minutes on 10 m gave me my highest 10-minute rate with 72 QSOs.
I decided to stay there until exactly 01 UTC and then move to 15. That was my best hour with a somewhat disappointing 342 QSOs, partly because of a very dense pileup and signals that were all about the same strength. I stayed there exactly one hour, then went back to 20 m for one more hour, and at 03 UTC moved to 40 m where I managed to find a hole among the crowd since I could not work above 7.200 because of regulations.
From there I started my 2BIQ operation (remember, the S for "Synchronized" does not apply on SSB) 🙂.
Night One: Static, Static, and a Power Outage¶
When I got on 40 m and noticed there was quite a bit of QRN, I knew it was going to be an extremely difficult night on 160/80, and that's exactly what it was. As you probably know, in Galápagos it always rains, at least a little bit every day, and if it is not raining, at night and at our location at 620 meters above sea level we are always inside the cloud, which sometimes creates unbearable static. But apparently it was not only at my location, because stations that should hear me easily were also not hearing me, and every QSO on the low bands was a major achievement for both sides.
If the second night did not improve, my multiplier count was going to end up well below my competitors, who by then, and as expected, were going to be Tom W2SC @ 8P5A and Bill W9KKN @ ZF1A.
When it finally seemed like the QRN was starting to go down a bit and I began making some QSOs on 160 around 10 UTC, what had not happened since the previous contest happened again: a full power outage on the entire island. It was 10:13 UTC, 4:13 local time.
"Who at that hour was going to solve the problem on this island?"
"Who do I call?"
"Do I need to notify someone?"
"Do I just go lie down and sleep?"
"What if I fall asleep and the power comes back?"
For several months now we've been waiting for a spare part to get the house generator working, and since there had not been any very long outages in the last few weeks, I had not worried about renting two generators — especially since there is none on the island that provides both 110 and 220 V.
I could do nothing, just sit and wait. By then Tom was already ahead of me by 420 QSOs and 22 multipliers, and Bill was really close behind.
After 55 minutes the power came back. It could have been much worse. By the time I got back on the air after powering everything up again, Tom was ahead by almost 500 QSOs. Even though he had not increased the gap by that much during that lost hour, at that point the difference already looked impossible to overcome.
Day 1, 13z: 2BIQ Flow State¶
But at 13 UTC, when 10 and 15 m opened at the same time, that difference began to shrink. Even though the pileups during the opening were interesting, I had never felt so good and so comfortable working two bands at the same time, so I decided to continue doing exactly that and never leave 2BIQ until the end.
It was the first time in my life that I concentrated so much that not only was I going at a relatively good pace, but I realized it was easy for me — not just to talk on one radio and listen on the other at the same time — to say the callsigns not phonetically, but just by the letters, something that is only possible with Americans.
I found a quiet voice level that worked perfectly so that, combined with the noise canceling in the headphones, I could barely hear myself.
During that first opening hour between 10/15 I managed 302 QSOs and had already reduced the difference with Tom to a little over 300 QSOs. Of the 3 times I made 9 QSOs in a minute, two of them were in 2BIQ, and the only time I made 10 QSOs in a minute, I was also operating two bands simultaneously. I even have a picture, because of how surprised I was, of a partial 10-QSO stretch showing 706/hr in N1MM. Nice to keep that going, right?
And what if I could keep that average trend going? Could I maybe hold that stability during the day and keep closing the gap with 8P5A?
"Focus, Manu! Two bands always, moving multipliers from one band to the other. You have to be consistent and as accurate as possible."
Another thing I did to see if I could improve my error rate was to get rid of state prediction. I had to enter every state manually when working a station. Of course that was going to be harder, but I had to be sure, or at least clearly hear, the state the other station was sending so I could log it. Many of my errors have come from "assuming" that the state showing up in the logger was correct, and very often in the rush you think it's right and hit Enter. Here I gave myself one more goal: try to be as accurate as possible.
The whole afternoon went exactly the way I had planned it — very steady. Nothing extreme in terms of rates, but just steady. During the 12 daylight hours, up until 00 UTC, the average rate was 265 Q/hr. Of those 12 hours, 9 were better than Tom's.
I'm doing all this analysis now by looking at the scoreboard, but at the time I had only set myself the goal of focusing on doing the best I could.
Only after the first 24 hours were complete did I look at the scoreboard and see that the difference with Tom was 50 QSOs and 10 multipliers behind. Now yes — my competitive mode had definitely kicked in. Somehow, maybe because of a better opening on 10 meters, I had managed to shave off the QSO difference.
"What do I need now?": MULTS!
If I wanted to get back into the conversation, I had to focus during the night on multipliers, not caring if I had to give up some QSOs, because if I repeated the Saturday afternoon trend on Sunday, I could get closer again.
Night Two: A Tripped Breaker and a Power Nap¶
I went down to 40 meters much earlier than usual, a little after grayline, staying on 20/40 for an hour and a half until I left 20 and moved to 80 also earlier than usual, something I would do a bit later with 160 too.
Incredibly, the QRN and noise level were 10 times lower than the previous night, and it looked like it was the same for everyone, because it was much easier to be heard. Between 3 and 4 UTC Sunday I managed to add 19 multipliers on 160 and 80. That was like striking gold.
At 1 a.m. local time, the world came crashing down on me again: another power outage. I started cursing and yelling like a madman, but when I stepped out onto the balcony I could still see in the distance the only two lights that are always visible at night from there. So I ran down the two floors to the entrance where the breakers are, and yes indeed — the shack breaker had tripped. Apparently the two air conditioners plus the amplifiers did not like each other. I got the power back and only lost 12 minutes. Ufff! What a scare! 🥵 From that point on, only one air conditioner.
After local midnight (6 UTC) is when everything slows down. For everyone. The first night between 8 and 10 UTC I had not gone above 50 QSOs each hour. The second night was not only going to be the same, it was going to be even worse. So I started thinking whether it would really be worth staying awake through that second night too and suffering all through Sunday, or take a good power nap, which might allow me to keep the focus I had on Saturday through the final 12 hours of the contest starting at sunrise in Galápagos.
And that's what I did. I gave myself the luxury of going to sleep.
Of course I took the precaution of setting alarms on every device I could find: phone, watch, iPad and computer. I laid down on the couch in the station with the intention of sleeping for no less than an hour and a half, and I even snoozed the alarms another 10 minutes.
I woke up, went to take a good almost-cold shower, made a strong coffee, and sat back down at my battle position. I was off for 2 hours and 25 minutes — no less. "How far did Tom get away from me?" Only 51 QSOs.
The difference was 258 QSOs and 7 multipliers behind. Exactly what I had imagined. I lost 50 more QSOs, but I gained much more than that for the rest of the day.
Day 2: The Comeback¶
10 and 15 took much longer to open than the day before, so I took advantage of that by wandering around 80, 40 and 20 before going to 15 and then 10, which gave me 3 extra multipliers that were no longer gold — they were diamonds! 💎
When I moved to 15 and 10, things were going very slowly, with 138 QSOs in the hour, but Tom was doing even worse with 84. Where is the propagation?
So I tried to focus again the same way as on Saturday — always calling on two bands — although this time I could tell that, despite the nap, it was very hard to coordinate the words to say the callsigns by letters only, and even to listen while talking. Good thing the rate was low. The lack of sleep definitely started to hit me in the middle of the afternoon. I could only imagine what would have happened without that nap.
The positive trend in my QSO number stayed there during the final 12 hours, only being beaten in one single hour and only by 11 QSOs, although at that moment I got lucky and was called by VE8NSD on 10, and he immediately agreed when I asked him to move to 15, which gave me a nice point boost for the 20z hour and woke me up a lot. So much so that the 21z hour was my best rate on Sunday with 237 QSOs.
At 17 UTC for the first time I had moved into the lead in QSO count when the summary showed exactly 7000 QSOs. But it was not until 19 UTC that Tom and I were tied on score, and from there I started stretching the difference a little.
The last big joy was being called by VY0ERC half an hour before the end to finish with 62 multipliers on 20 and a total of 211 QSOs in the last hour alternating between 20 and 15 m.
In the end, I finished with over 200 QSOs ahead and 3 multipliers behind.
Reflections¶
The point difference is insignificant. Technically it's another tie with Tom. I've seen this movie before, and the ending has never been favorable to me. I know Tom is extremely accurate in his log, and that is something I've been working on and need to keep working hard on.
In this contest, as I mentioned, I took it seriously, doing things I had never done before in order to try to improve my performance. Whether it worked or not, we'll know in a few months.
For me, this is already a victory. Having the chance to fight up there with Tom is a huge honor for me and I hope it keeps happening many more times.
When the next day I stood on that balcony at the station and looked at the POTA antennas, as I call them — when I looked at those now famous crooked bamboo poles, some repaired or extended with fiberglass, those tiny Spiderbeams that look more like laundry racks than antennas, or that short vertical for 160 m — I could only smile.
That place is wonderful. Magical. There is a reason it has the history it has. There is a reason that very same place still holds, and will continue to hold, the oldest standing record in this very contest and in the entire contest calendar in SOAB HP: almost 10.5 k QSOs and more than 10 M points.
Why do I say it will continue to hold it? Because the drop in participation from North American stations in this contest is obvious and dramatic. I don't know if it has to do with the ARRL, with publicity, with propagation, or if it is simply the same trend we see in other contests too, but the increase in the number of radio amateurs in the U.S. at least does not seem to be reflected in participation in their own contest.
Beyond that, and going back to my smile on the balcony, it is obvious that with good antennas — or better said, with REAL antennas and not compromise antennas — this place will become just as legendary again as it was in its golden days. Hopefully we get there soon.
Scoreboard, TTS, and Where Contesting Goes¶
I want to take a moment to thank everyone — the more and more people who keep joining the scoreboard. At one point it was hard for me to adapt to it. I even thought about not looking at it because if the one behind me passed me I would get desperate, or if I couldn't catch the one ahead of me I would get discouraged.
In some contests I have stopped looking at it; in others, like this one, I only look at certain pre-set moments. But what we need to understand most is that a competition is not only internal — there are many people watching. We have more spectators than we imagine. And why not think that many of those who have stopped participating, or those who still don't dare to do it, might in the end find the courage to see that they too can be there?
This weekend was useful to me for many things, among them to fully understand and convince myself of several things. The first is that I stand by my position of not using TTS or anything like it. There is nothing faster than the human being using our natural means of communication, even while making mistakes when speaking another language or trying to rush the pronunciation of something we were not trained to say from childhood. At the end of the day we are humans, and I will keep defending competition between human beings.
About that, I want to congratulate Bud AA3B, who as CQ WPX Director was the first among the "big" contests to take the step of reducing the deadline to 48 hours. As I've already explained, in my opinion that is still too long, but at least it shows commitment and interest. It's a step in the right direction in facing the new challenges. Also for explicitly banning and condemning the use of robots or autonomous systems, and for other changes aimed at a general modernization of the rules. I hope this is the starting point and that the rest also take action, with even more improvements.
Station Setup¶
Antennas¶
- 160 m: 22-meter top-loaded vertical
- 80 m: 1/4-wave vertical
- 40 m: 4-element wire Yagi NA + 4-element wire Yagi EU
- 20 / 15 / 10 m: Spiderbeam fixed NA + Spiderbeam fixed EU
- RX: 170 m (560 ft) Beverage — used on most bands
Radios and amplifiers¶
- Flex 8600 + Flex 6600 + MK2R+
- PGXL + Acom 2000A
- 4O3A HP band-pass filters + triplexers (Radio A) + ICE 419 LP filter (Radio B)
Results¶
| Band | QSOs | Mults |
|---|---|---|
| 160m | 45 | 20 |
| 80m | 335 | 54 |
| 40m | 1,024 | 60 |
| 20m | 1,576 | 62 |
| 15m | 2,007 | 61 |
| 10m | 3,240 | 61 |
| Total | 8,227 | 318 |
Final score: 7,847,604
Notable stats¶
- Best 60-minute rate: 342/hr (01:02–02:01 UTC)
- Best 30-minute rate: 394/hr
- Best 10-minute rate: 420/hr (00:10–00:19 UTC)
- Unique callsigns worked: 4,788
- Band changes: 3,138 — Probable 2nd-radio QSOs: 1,814 (22.2%)
- Stations worked on all 6 bands: 33
Hourly QSO rate¶
Hour-by-hour breakdown
Hour 160 80 40 20 15 10 Rate Total Pct
--------------------------------------------------------------------
0000 0 0 0 33 0 274 307 307 3.7
0100 0 0 0 14 318 1 333 640 7.8
0200 0 0 0 309 0 0 309 949 11.6
0300 0 0 105 136 0 0 241 1190 14.5
0400 3 24 140 0 0 0 167 1357 16.6
0500 1 14 99 0 0 0 114 1471 18.0
0600 0 1 73 63 0 0 137 1608 19.6
0700 0 6 32 50 0 0 88 1696 20.7
0800 1 9 28 19 0 0 57 1753 21.4
0900 11 29 1 0 0 0 41 1794 21.9
1000 0 6 14 0 0 0 20 1814 22.2
1100 1 31 31 0 0 0 63 1877 22.9
1200 0 0 13 5 84 42 144 2021 24.7
1300 0 0 0 0 125 176 301 2322 28.4
1400 0 0 0 0 102 182 284 2606 31.8
1500 0 0 0 0 76 186 262 2868 35.0
1600 0 0 0 0 77 183 260 3128 38.2
1700 0 0 0 0 61 189 250 3378 41.3
1800 0 0 0 0 56 196 252 3630 44.3
1900 0 0 0 1 66 197 264 3894 47.6
2000 0 0 0 0 112 160 272 4166 50.9
2100 0 0 0 0 119 140 259 4425 54.0
2200 0 0 0 0 115 118 233 4658 56.9
2300 0 0 0 165 5 104 274 4932 60.2
0000 0 0 0 153 22 71 246 5178 63.2
0100 0 0 97 109 0 0 206 5384 65.8
0200 0 29 115 54 0 0 198 5582 68.2
0300 20 81 42 0 0 0 143 5725 69.9
0400 2 49 58 28 0 0 137 5862 71.6
0500 0 5 58 70 0 0 133 5995 73.2
0600 0 31 34 0 0 0 65 6060 74.0
0700 1 11 24 0 0 0 36 6096 74.5
0800 5 1 31 0 0 0 37 6133 74.9
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6133 74.9
1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6133 74.9
1100 0 8 2 37 0 0 47 6180 75.5
1200 0 0 26 20 31 0 77 6257 76.4
1300 0 0 0 85 50 0 135 6392 78.1
1400 0 0 0 2 48 59 109 6501 79.4
1500 0 0 0 0 55 131 186 6687 81.7
1600 0 0 0 0 37 135 172 6859 83.8
1700 0 0 0 0 36 116 152 7011 85.6
1800 0 0 0 3 37 140 180 7191 87.8
1900 0 0 0 0 35 158 193 7384 90.2
2000 0 0 0 0 81 94 175 7559 92.3
2100 0 0 0 0 123 112 235 7794 95.2
2200 0 0 0 73 51 58 182 7976 97.4
2300 0 0 0 136 75 0 211 8187 100.0
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Total 45 335 1023 1565 1997 3222 8187
Closing¶
Congratulations and thanks to 8P5A, ZF1A, and Ken KP4AA, who made a late appearance on the scoreboard with an excellent score, battling neck and neck with Bill throughout the contest.
A special thanks to the more than 70 stations who answered my request to move to another band and give me their multiplier, and to the 4,788 stations who called me on one or more bands.
See you in CQ WPX SSB!
Gallery¶
73, Manu LU9ESD / AC1NU