After nearly two full days of playing radio in the CQWW WPX CW Contest, it ended at 2359 (4:59pm PST) today. Unlike previous contest, I finally got to spend more than a few hours in the shack, turn knobs and pushing buttons. I logged just over 17 hours between the start of the contest on Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. I stopped a few hours short of the end in order to spend time with my son.
As I sit here at the rig, I can still hear CW running through my ears, as if the whirl of the fan in the computer is trying to talk to me. Typical though, had it happen in the past. The unofficial results, 230 QSOs, 152 prefixes and 385 points for a total of 58,520. My best band (# of Q’s) was 20M with 179 QSOs, 15M yielded 30 QSOs, 40M with 16 QSOs and 10M with 5 QSOs. I was pleased to record totals on four different bands. I tried keying up on 80M last night, but had just over 25w output and was not heard. I was not surprised.
I was also excited to add some new DXCC entities that I had not previously logged. I was impressed with my work in Europe. I added: Georgia, Cyprus, Portugal, Canary Islands, Estonia, France, Italy, Sicily, Bulgaria, Finland, Aland Island, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and European and Asiatic Russia.
Other notable counties included Morocco in west Africa, Japan, Columbia, Honduras, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Cayman Islands and New Zealand. Of course the remainder of the contacts were from Canada, Mexico and the USA.All in all a wonderful take! A total of 25 new DXCC entities, which doubles what I had going into this weekend.
I’ll have a better report and the log posted to the web site later this week. Time to start going through the log and cleaning it up and confirming contacts and adding it to the logbook.