This past weekend was the CQ WPX RTTY contest. A single operator is allowed to work 30 hours out of the 48 hours the contest runs. I worked close to 30 of those hours. In the end I made 525 contacts.
I had a difficult time working well in run mode. Stations were packed together, overlapping and often multiple stations (different parts of the world) causing QRM on each other. I guess with a wire antenna, you can’t block out what you aren’t listening for like you can with a beam. When I did go into run mode, I felt like I just wasn’t getting enough contacts coming back to me and I felt more productive doing S&P. I just couldn’t get any decent runs going of more then 4 or 5 stations before it seemed like I was calling CQ for minutes on end without anyone coming back.
Some of the stats from quickly analyzing the log shows I made a QSo with 46 of the 50 states only missing out on Idaho, Montanna, West Virginia and Vermont. Had a few contacts with both Hawaii and strong Alaska stations. I also logged 4 new DXCCs for me which were Nicaragua, Armenia, Corsica and Belize. Corsica is already confirmed on LoTW.
In the afternoon on Sunday I switched to 15m after seeing some spots in the cluster and made 5 quick contacts with strong signals from Uruguay and Argentina. After I made the 5th contact the band closed on me and I could hardly hear them even though they were just booming in a minute ago.
In eQSL I’ve seen 3 contacts come in which I don’t have in my log. All 3 call signs seem familiar, so either they weren’t patient enough for me to confirm (QRM and they moved on before I could confirm) or I made mistake in commiting the QSO to the log. It isn’t as if I have a contact entered like their call sign but just slightly off, so I’d say it is the former and not the latter.
Here’s my score summary:
Band QSOs Pts WPX 3.5 93 228 46 7 135 442 77 14 279 528 150 21 18 44 8 Total 525 1242 281
Score : 349,00273,
K2DSL