When you have a modest station, listening to the big guns on 20 meters in any of the major DX contests can be frustrating.  In contrast, the ARRL 10 meter contest has several advantages for the smaller station.   A simple 28 MHz yagi up 35 feet is equal in performance to a 14 MHz monobander on a 70 foot tower.  And the 10 meter band is quite large, so most of the participants can spread out and be heard, in contrast to 20 meters where a smaller station (like mine) may be buried under multiple layers of stronger signals.   

I generally only operate in a couple contests each year, with one of them being Field Day.  In past years I’ve tended to put the rest of my contest energy into the ARRL 160 contest.  The downside of that event is that after pulling two all-nighters on Top Band, I tend to be fairly wiped-out for the following week. The sunspots this past month were quite healthy, so I decided to shift my focus this December to the ARRL 10 meter contest.  Since the 10 meter band in December is generally only open for 12- or 13 hours per day, this also meant that I could get a good night’s sleep while making full use of the band’s DX openings.  

I enjoy CW contesting and Tom Dunbar, W6ESL, prefers SSB, so this year we teamed up and participated in the contest’s low-power (150 watts or less) multi-operator / single-transmitter category from my QTH.  I already have a basic three-element tribander with a rotor up 40 feet that we could use to chase DX.  We decided to upgrade the site into a “poor man’s contest station” by adding a 2-element 10-meter yagi pointing at the East Coast.   (The 2-element 10-meter monobander was constructed by cannibalizing a discarded a Hygain tribander and was put on a 30 foot pushup mast.)   This way, when the Pacific is open in the late afternoon, the tribander could be pointed west and used for Asian multipliers, while the 2-element yagi could continue to pick-off Midwest contacts without the need to swing the bigger antenna around.

Tom and I worked in tag-team mode with each of us taking alternate ~3 hour shifts (him on SSB and me on CW).  Our QSO rates for the two modes were similar.  The sunspots were quite healthy and provided plenty of openings to Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific.  (The solar flux during the contest was in the neighborhood of 158-162.)  We worked a fair number of Europeans between 6 and 8am and plenty of Asian and South Pacific stations between 3 and 6pm.   Midday, we kept busy working stations on the East Coast and the Midwest.  We ended up working roughly the same number of multipliers in both CW and SSB.  

By the time the dust settled on Sunday afternoon, we found we had made a respectable showing with an estimated score of almost 245,000 points – well above our previous personal record of 178,000 in 2011 (which currently is the Pacific Division record for the multi-op low power category.) 

Bottom Line:  You don’t need big antennas and tall towers to have a load of fun in this contest.   And teaming up with a friend can make the contest even more of a kick.