The M/2 category is many contests allows two simultaneous signals on two bands, without restriction on who they can each contact. Thus, you can have both stations running, and not restricted to hunting multipliers. There can be additional stations operating S & P on the same or different bands provided they operated within the constraints of maximum band changes per hour (typically between 6 and 10) and never having two simultaneous signals on the same band.
M/2 is a popular category since it keeps more operators in a multi-op entry active and involved without the burden of competing in the M/M (multi-multi) category. I hosted M/2 teams for the CQ WW CW and SSB contests in 2023 and I operated M/2 at VE3JM at least once. The plan was to do so again for last week's ARRL DX CW contest. There is friendly rivalry with VA2WA about 200 km east of us. Last year we surpassed them, but it was close.
Our plan fell apart a few days before the contest. One team member fell ill. Then we were walloped by two successive snow storms, one a few days before the contest and another forecast for the weekend. About 70 cm fell in the vicinity of Vlad's contest station. One of the operators wouldn't abandon his wife to deal with the second storm. especially since he had no idea when he could return. Our last minute attempt to recruit others was unsuccessful.
It came down to just Vlad and me. I nearly abandoned because I was busy dealing with a family matter. Since that required my presence in a town only 70 km from Vlad's station, before and after the contest weekend, I decided there was no reason not to participate in the contest.
I had a surreal drive down Canada's busiest highway (401) that was still partially snow covered from the first storm. The ditches and median were littered with countless car and truck wrecks. There were even more during the drive home after the contest from the second and worse storm.
When I got there late afternoon on Friday we discussed the pros and cons of entering M/S or M/2. We read through the rules, considered our expected stamina and the effects of the geomagnetic storm. We chose M/2 because it would be more fun and both of us were accustomed to operating 48 hour contests. We intended to do our best without expecting to be very competitive among other M/2 entries.
Vlad set us up to participate in the online scoreboard. Then we shared a pizza and got down to business when the clock struck 0000Z.
Note: The rest of this article is primarily of interest to contesters. Others might find it less so. There are no pictures since I was too busy operating. Vlad has updated his QRZ.com page which is full of pictures.
Propagation
A K-index between 3 and 5 for most of the contest did not bode well for the score. Everyone suffered, though not equally. As is typically the case for geomagnetic storms, those of us in the auroral zone feel it more. Indeed, anyone whose signals must pass through the zone feel it. It's just that we see attenuated signal on most paths, including the all important one to Europe.
Those nearby in W1/2/3 and VE1/VO1 tend to fare better since they can "slide" under (south) of the zone. That said, almost everyone was affected. When we're all in the same boat, all scores are lower. Too often we would simply run out of propagation. Openings started later and closed sooner. Signals were weaker and thus many small stations didn't get into our log. Either we couldn't copy them or they simply gave up and turned off the radio. Stations further north (TF, OY, OH, etc.) or in the southern auroral zone (Antarctica) were exceptionally weak.
160 meters is less affected since signals tend to stay below most of the disturbed layers of the ionosphere. Even so it was surprising to see country totals over 50 for many of the big guns. We managed 49, which is pretty good since with just the two of us we couldn't check conditions frequently or make timely band changes. DX openings didn't last long but there were enough of them to make a difference.
When propagation resulted in especially low rates, I might take a brief break to eat, make coffee or check my email. Just 10 minutes is enough to feel refreshed and return to the grind. Towards the end of the contest the conditions improved and we were able to finish strong.
Station set up
The two run stations were Flex with a PGXL amp, and a K3 with an AL1200. Since there were just two of us we each adopted a station that we used throughout the contest. I am not very familiar with Flex equipment so I took the latter. The third station was for in-band, which could not be used.
We used DXLog which, frankly, is not my favourite. It works quite well but with an unfamiliar interface, the default colours and fonts are atrocious and the function keys never seemed to do what I expected. Other times DXLog would get into a peculiar state (Vlad told me to hit ESC a few times) or a wrong key press would wipe a half completed QSO. Then I'd have to appear an idiot by requesting a repeat of the call sign, unless I was lucky enough to remember it.
There are other things I could say about DXLog but I'll stop there. It isn't really fair to complain when many problems may be the operator (me) unacquainted with the software. For example, with N1MM I am used to controlling RIT with the up/down arrow keys. Those are used to navigate the log in DXlog. I had to use the radio; if there's a keyboard method I don't know it. The K3 display is quite small so that the RIT value (+0.02 etc.) only display when the knob is turned. I had to manually reset it after every use since I could not reliably remember its value.
Another quirk of the K3 that I don't like is the receive audio quality. Some have raved about its crispness. That is not my experience. When I get several near zero beat callers, it's sounds like someone scratching a chalkboard with their fingernails. Also pretty bad is that the AGC doesn't compress the audio as much as I'd like. If I turn up the gain to copy a weak signal, when the next caller is strong the audio is painfully loud. The K3 was wonderful when it was new but today we have better rigs.
I am comfortable with a manually tuned amplifier, so it was easy to tune it quickly after band changes. We didn't do that often except to chase multipliers on other bands if we had hourly band changes remaining.
Antennas were selected within DXLog and antennas could be turned manually or via digital entry of the bearing in the call sign field of DXLog. It worked well. One day I'd like to do the same for my customer antenna selection software. That won't happen quickly unless I get impatient and use a commercial product.
The two tri-band yagis have VA6AM triplexers so we could both use them. However, we didn't always agree on the direction! There were enough antennas that we negotiated solution that satisfied us.
As for the antennas, Vlad's station is different but similar in capability to mine. There are stacks on the high bands, either 2× or 3× 4/5-element stacks to Europe and rotatable top yagis, plus a long boom 7-element on 10. On 40 meters there is a rotatable W6NL Moxon at 140' and an XM240 at ~100' fixed on Europe. For 80 meters there is a 4-square and a low inverted vee that is not useful in DX contests. Like me he has a shunt fed big tower on 160. He added wire parasitic elements that provide a small gain to the northeast and southwest. There are two reversible Beverages for receive.
That is a good complement of antennas. It is not equal to the biggest of big gun stations but well suited to the challenges of DX contests. Vlad turns in exemplary scores in single op contests. He's a better operator than I'll ever be.
Operating
We ran as much as we could. When the pile ups thinned we would click on stations in the band map or available mults & Q's window. Call them if they're there and then a one-key shortcut to return to the run frequency to resume CQing. I lost my run frequency only a handful of times, but you have to be quick.
Vlad and I frequently discussed openings, band changes, breaks, station passing, antenna use and direction. We could do this pretty effectively even while running pile ups. It may seem odd to watch us logging QSOs and talking at the same time.
Regular readers may recall that I often complain about errors by others copying my call. All those dits cause confusion. The most common error is VE3UN. I have since had that error removed from SCP (super check partial) but it doesn't seem to help all that much -- casual operators don't use SCP or forget to update the database, while others don't pay close attention. I had the thought that with so many dashes that VE3JM would be less prone to copy errors. Wrong!
Despite keeping my sending speed to 36 wpm and lower most of the time, errors were common. Typical examples were VE3MM (a fellow contester), VE3OM (dropped dit), VE3OO (?), VE2JM (VE2/VE3 confusion is common), and a few rarer mistakes. That's just how it goes -- there is no good solution. I suppose we should be happy that so many hams are active on CW, even if only on contest weekends. I wonder whether they pay attention to the LCR (UBN) reports they receive.
Tangling in the pile ups highlighted a difference in technique among the big guns. Most stations click on the spot and toss in their call, big guns and little pistols alike. You might think that the big gun would win every time, yet they do not. Brute force only gets you so far. The sum total of the other callers may be as strong as or stronger than the big gun, or the QRM makes it impossible for the DX operator to separate one caller from the bedlam.
I would evaluate the circumstances when my initial "brute force" call failed. I might recognize the call signs of other big (and bigger) guns or that the successful callers were in locations with more favourable paths. There are a couple of techniques to deal with the pile up. One is to call well off frequency, around 100 Hz, to make your signal uniquely distinguishable. The other is to call twice, hoping that the second call has less competition than the first. Don't do that if the DX operator is responding quickly because the added QRM slows everyone down!
If neither works quickly there is the third option: go away and try again later. There are other stations to work and you don't want your rate to suffer. A few minutes later, after the big guns have moved on, go back and one call puts the mult in the log. These are lessons many little pistols have learned and that some big guns have forgetten.
Breaks
Yes, even with a great station you can run out of stations to work. As already mentioned, this is not the most popular of contests. The reason is that for many stations, North America is far away and difficult to work. Contests where everybody can work everybody will always draw more participants. That said, over 5600 contacts during a weekend with challenging propagation is not so bad.
Even with 5600 contacts spread over ~40 hours operating time is not as busy as it sounds. Consider that there were two run stations. That's like 80 hours for a single op or M/S entry. Divide 5600 by 80 and the average rate for each operator is only about one QSO per minute. The average is itself misleading since during the morning high band openings to Europe the rate can easily surpass 3 QSO per minutes per operator. The rate at other times can be painfully slow.
So, what to do? We hunted for stations and multipliers as much as we could, trying to keep an eye (or two) on the AMQ window (available multipliers and QSOs). Many of those required careful tactics and operator communication to pick suitable antennas, turn them if necessary and decide which station is best to chase a station based on the band change quota. For whatever reason, Vlad made many more band changes than I did, mostly because he was considerate about not interrupting my runs.
Yeet there were still dead times. We both took sleep breaks soon after European sunrise (after ~2 AM local time) when the low band rates plummeted and the high bands turned up little. During the afternoons, a quick break might be taken to get refreshed by doing something different, be it to check email, progress of the snow storm or to prepare and deliver food and drink to the other operator. One way or another we kept busy. But we took no sleep breaks other than a few hours overnight. We got up before sunrise to chase mults on the low bands.
Perhaps what was most frustrating were the poor rates when the propagation was quite good. You know it's good when the DX stations are loud but there are so few of them. Casual and only moderately serious contesters keep to a more human schedule for contests like ARRL DX. Tthat means regular sleep, meals and attending to their families and other responsibilities. They're in bed at 3 AM local time.
Taking a break at those times is not sacrilege. What you find is that the stations will still be there after the breaks. They want to work you and they will. Usually there would be a flurry of activity after breaks when we were newly spotted by the CW skimmers and by stations that had just "rotated" onto the band. After 5 or 10 minutes it was back to the grind.
Problems
Other than the problem of not enough operators, we had a few others. Some I've already touched on in this article, which I'll elaborate upon. They can be surprising.
Snow is precipitation, and therefore can cause precipitation static. Especially a major snowstorm accompanied by high winds. The upper yagis are most affected. The highest antennas on all bands from 40 to 10 meters were periodically unusable once the storm intensified on Saturday and continued through Sunday. We had to choose lower yagis. That wasn't too dreadful since there were fixed stacks to Europe on the 20, 15 and 10. It was unfortunate that on 40 meters we had to use the less effective XM240 rather than the Moxon. The Moxon is much smaller than my 3-element yagi but I was impressed by how well it worked.
As the saying goes: you can't work them if you can't hear them. It believe it is possible to select different receive and transmit antenna via the DXLog interface but for some reason we didn't do that. Perhaps that was an oversight on our part. I don't know the setup well enough to know for sure and I never thought to ask Vlad.
There was occasional severe interference between the stations. I don't know if it the Flex station was responsible or if it was the K3 receiver. Both have a pretty good reputation. The towers at Vlad's station are closer together than in mine, which might have had an impact. I know the VA6AM high power BPF work well, as do the triplexers. When one of us accidentally chose a run frequency half that of the other station it was easy enough to move. It's a common problem on CW; for example, 7.002 MHz and 14.004 MHz. It happens far less often on SSB since the phone band segments are mostly not harmonically related.
We didn't self spot, which is permitted in ARRL contests, even for unassisted entries. Many casual operators solely rely on human spots so this might have helped raise our score.
At the height of the snowstorm the lights flickered quite often. We crossed our fingers and hoped that the power would not go it. When it happened we'd exchange worried looks. Luckily the electrical supply held up. That was one big problem we escaped! You just never know with distribution networks in low density farm country, even though the grid is well maintained.
Results
Vlad had the online scoreboard on his screen but I didn't bother. The only page I had open was the space weather dashboard. When the going was slow and I was curious I'd ask him how we were doing. Mostly we were tracking our usual close competitors at VA2WA. With more operators they kept ahead of us though the margin was small.
In the end we had about the same number of multipliers as VA2WA and they had 4% more QSOs. That's not bad for two operator M/2. Had activity been higher or the propagation better, their advantage would have been greater. Maybe I shouldn't complain so much about the poor propagation since it may have helped us. It'll be interesting to see whether errors change the comparison after log checking.
I pulled the following from Vlad's submission to 3830:
Call: VE3JM
Operator(s): VE3JM VE3VN
Station: VE3JM
Class: M/2 HP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs): 40:50
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 110 49
80: 612 81
40: 1156 105
20: 1154 114
15: 1445 117
10: 1138 112
-------------------
Total: 5615 578 Total Score = 9,660,114
Again, complain as I might, we did pretty well. The multipliers were there and we worked almost all that we could. Mostly we lost out on those in Asia on paths through the auroral zone. DXCC on 4 bands is quite good, as is the large number of mults on 160 and 80. I didn't expect to work nearly so many on 160. Vlad worked most of those, even running Europeans at intervals when signal levels peaked.
Last year we scored over 13 million points, and other stations had similar results.
The storm continued after the contest ended so we both spent the night at the station. In the morning, Vlad dug us out when his neighbour had tractor trouble and couldn't help. Typical for Canada, the roads were quickly plowed and we were both on our way, Vlad heading west to Ottawa while I drove east to resume my familial obligations.
When I arrived home in the evening I only had the time and energy to clear enough of the driveway to get my car off the road. Then I slept. A lot. The rest of my 100 meter long driveway had to wait for another day.