Contesting with a 6600M in the CQ WW WPX at VP5P

Ross, W2TT and I took a Flex 6600M to Turks and Caicos for the 2018 CQ WPX SSB contest last month and operated as VP5P.

We’ll see if this holds up after the logs are checked, but cqwpx.com shows our unofficial “Raw Score” at 9.5 million points. This puts us #1 in North America in the Multi Operator - Single Transmitter (M/S) high power category, and #13 World.  Needless to say, this was way above our expectations.

In addition to the 6600M, our station consisted of an Elecraft KPA 500 amp, a SteppIR at 30' (3 elements on 20 - 10, one element on 40), and an end fed 1/2 wave wire antenna on 80.

We ran the 6600M non-stop for all 48 hours of the contest.  With the exception of one 10 minute glitch, the 6600M performed flawlessly. We had at least a dozen unsolicited comments about the high quality of the audio coming from the 6600M.  We are used to getting good reports on Flex audio but never had this many during a contest.

We found the 6600M has the ergonomic benefits of a traditional knob radio for contesting, but with the significant added advantage of the large, built-in, touch screen panadapter. The 6600M receiver performed well.  When 40 was open, the band was jammed with S9 +20 signals adjacent-to and usually overlapping our run frequency so we used the receive filtering constantly.

Bottom line is the Flex 6600M performed great in the contest and I wanted to pass that on to everyone here.

73,
John, AF3K