IARU HF Championship

Last weekend was the IARU HF Championship.  It’s a 24 hour contest with HQ stations in the different zones.  My new call is a zone 7 call but I am in zone 8.  Some logging software automatically populate the zone number so I had to correct quite a few people.  I was wondering if that was going to be an issue.   A couple other people said they really liked my callsign as well so it evened out.  Some people heard the first A in AA0O as Papa or Delta, I think I might have missed getting a full contact with LC5K in Norway because of this.  He faded out pretty much right after the contact so I wasn’t able to correct him.  I also tried to work Europe during the day on 20m and it was really difficult.  I took a break during the afternoon and came back in the evening and Europe was wide open and easy to contact.  I think next time I do a contest like this I’ll focus on the US during the day on 20m and not try for Europe until the evening.  I ended up with 115 contacts (2 of those CW, most of the CW is still too fast for me).  Claimed score was over 17,000, but we’ll see how it ends up.  It might be enough to get listed in the Southeast region results.