I had a good time with the CQ WW CW contest this year. This is my favorite one as all the contacts are DX and there’s really no exchange since it’s just the CQ Zone of your country. Only the US has callsigns were you can’t be certain which zone it is so I just need to copy the callsign. There were a couple of rare DX on that I couldn’t get, HX1TT in Saudi Arabia had a pileup going the whole time and I couldn’t get through. I got lots of others though:
Did 10 hours of the ARRL CW Sweepstakes. Ended up with 76 of the 83 zones. Missed the Northern Territories of Canada, and PEI, plus Eastern Washington State only had one guy calling(I did all S&P). I entered this one as assisted. I setup the CW Skimmer program on my shack computer and had it feed into my laptop (the skimmer uses quite a bit of CPU and heats up the laptop). This worked really well because unlike an internet based spotting network, the skimmer only shows me callsigns that my radio can hear. This contest has a long exchange with the year you got your license. Lots of 50’s…
