CQWW CW Summary
Less action but higher score in CQWW CW, how is that possible? The answer is in the summary below, keep reading.
Being prepared and well rested is crucial to be successful in any contest. Good propagation can help, but it can also be very selective. This year I was not fully prepared, definitely not well rested and propagation was not on my side. Not the ideal situation!
What played in my favor was the 15 meter antenna upgrade made in preparation for this contest season. It helped boost my signal to NA and my most productive hour was Sunday at 15:00 when a nice two hour NA run on 15 started and lasted into sunset. 15 meter also produced the most multipliers thanks to a fruitful search and punch session during late sunset on Sunday.
Propagation on 10 meter was good enough for search and pounce of multipliers, especially to AS and AF but also SA and NA. 20 meter produced the most contacts overall but it came in 5 zones and 9 countries short compared to 15.
40 meter is normally a great band for both quantity and multipliers, but this weekend propagation was weird. The band was calm with good DX propagation, but high angle paths where broken. The few EU stations that came through had weak and hollow backscatter sounding signals. Without EU it was hard to get good runs going and build the numbers on 40.
80 meter became the goto band for runs in the dark hours, it outperformed 40 in number of contacts but did not provide as many multipliers due to the simple transmit antenna, a short vertical T. 160 meter provided a few good but short runs boosting the numbers of country multipliers, but it provided very few Zone multipliers.
The end result is OK, but not anywhere near my goal mainly due to the weird propagation on 40. I was able to improve the final (claimed) score with 250 fewer contacts than a year ago. A total of 499 multipliers, 84 more than in 2011 year made a big difference.
Band QSOs Zones Countries ------------------------------ 160: 312 9 42 80: 660 15 58 40: 551 24 75 20: 714 25 66 15: 612 30 75 10: 113 23 57 ------------------------------ Total: 2962 126 373 Total Score = 2,492,006
Another goal for this year was to lower the logging errors, and as I already played by the “no-post-edit rules” last year the results should be comparable. I’ll guess I just have to wait for the UBN report and see. One can hope the new “submit-by-5-days rule” will speed up the results.
Congratulations to SJ2W who broke the record of the category and beat Nordic super stations like OH8X!
To conclude, the CQWW CW contest weekend was challenging but fun. I was able to improve my result compared to 2011 despite weaker band conditions. But I can do better than this, so I am already looking forward to CQWW CW 2013!