Started just as a casual entry but it was fun so I kept going. I mostly searched for new multipliers to get my score up. On Thursday I received the parts I was waiting for to hook up my CW skimmer full time (I’ll be doing a write up on this soon). Since this contest doesn’t give points for US/Canada contacts the skimmer made it easy to skip over those, increasing how fast I could find new stations. I was just under 8 hours so that’s 47 QSO/hour which is pretty good for search and pounce. Sometimes I’d just catch the last part of the call and respond then verify the skimmer after the Q,…

Was shooting for 700 Q’s, once I realized that wasn’t gonna happen I slowed down a lot. I need to spend more time on 40m on Friday night, my 40m stats were much lower. I got a few new ones, hadn’t ever worked China and got two China stations in 5 minutes, also South Korea and Kazakhstan which I missed last year. 

Only managed a little over an hour with the ARRL DX CW contest this weekend but made 57 contacts. Added some new DXCC’s on 10m with Greenland, Kenya and Mexico, probably some others as well.

Put in about 8 hours on the ARRL DX CW contest this weekend for 212 contacts. This is my 2nd favorite after the CQ WW CW. Tons of people on the air, the rarer stations all had thick pile ups, I didn’t get through to Kenya or Morocco. The pile ups didn’t make a lot of sense, there would be 20 people calling an Italy station, then no one calling another Italy station a few kHz away. DX stations send their power as the exchange and I use the log from last year, looks like quite a few people got new amps for Christmas, many changed from 100watts to a…

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:

I received my CWOPs CWT Bronze Participation Medal. Even though it’s a participation medal it’s not easy to get. It is award for completing at least 10 contacts each in at least 60 weekly CWT morse code contests in the year. There’s 3 hour long sessions every Wednesday. I’m going for Gold this year, which is 120 sessions, I’m over halfway there already.