I wasn’t planning on operating much this past weekend on the CQ WW CW contest. I didn’t get on Fri evening and first got on Sat morning for a bit before running some errands. The bands, specifically 10m was good, and there was a lot of activity. I was able to quickly work many DXCC entities in a short amount of time.
Saturday afternoon I got back on and things were still hot so I worked 10m trying to get new DXCC entities I hadn’t worked or new ones on 10m. I was running assisted so I could see what was showing up without having to tune and then listen for each call. There were some pretty good pileups going for many of the rarer stations but if you could get there quickly before the crowd showed up, you had a shot. Otherwise, you needed to use your brain and time things right. As a last resort, tune to a different station and come back later or tomorrow. Most stations were operating the entire weekend and if conditions remained the same, they should be around on Sunday too.
As Saturday wore on, I started to really accumulate entities on 10m. As the day/evening wore on, I also worked 15m and 20m. As it got darked I worked some stations on 40m and 80m. I was just looking for entities I hadn’t worked yet vs logging too many for the same entities. On Saturday evening I was hoping to see/hear Alaska on 80m as that is the last state I need for 5BWAS but I didn’t see them spotted. On Sunday morning I saw some spots for KL7’s but it was well past I was asleep.
Sunday came and I was only able to work until about 1pm ET (1800z) in between getting ready to go out for the day. 10m was still open so I continued to pick and choose new entities. As the time passed, it seemed like it might be possible to log 100 entities for just 10m and I was able to just sneak that in with 102 entities logged on 10m.
Some of the notable stations logged:
| 3D2R – RotumaIsland (15m) – New band | 3DA0ET – Swaziland (10m & 20m) – New band |
| 4U1ITU – ITU HQ (10m & 15m) – New bands | 5H3EE – Tanzania (15m) |
| 5R8IC – Madagascar (10m) – New band | 9J3A – Zambia (10m) |
| 9L1A – Sierra Leone (15m) | 9X0NH – Rwanda (15m) – New DXCC |
| D3AA – Angola (15m) – New band | DX1J – Philippines (20m) |
| NH2DX – Guam (15m) | OY1CT – FaroeIsland (10m) – New band |
| TC0A – Turkey (10m) | UP2L – Kazakhstan (40m) – New band |
| XT2FCJ – Burkina (10m, 15m & 20m) – New DXCC | Z81R/Z81X – South Sudan (10m & 15m) – New DXCC |
| ZM4T – New Zealand (10m & 15m) |
It looks like I ended up logging 3 new DXCC entities, none of which took much effort during the contest. I worked 114 different entities during the contest and 102 on just 10m. 34 zones out of 40 total zones were worked across all the bands.
Here’s the score summary from N1MM:
Here’s a map of the contacts made using ADIF2MAP (click for a larger image):
Great fun over a few hours on a weekend. Logs uploaded to LoTW, eQSL, ClubLog and to the contest robot.
73,
K2DSL