I participated again this year in the ARRL DX CW Contest. I started slow on Friday night, only making a handful of contacts. It didn’t seem like band conditions were very good. My 80 meter antenna is also down, so I didn’t have that option. I only do search and pounce, no CQing. I also do unassisted, no looking up spots or using N1MM bandmap.
I also started off with 100 watts, which puts me in the Low Power category. But, though I hate to do it, I turned on my amp. At only 500 watts, it still is in the High Power category. I do qualify for “Limited Antenna”.
I picked it up a bit on Saturday afternoon. I made some changes with N1MM and got the workflow working pretty well. Being a contest, for efficiency sake and to operate at speeds that most of the DX are operating at (25-45 WPM), I opted to just let N1MM send the exchange. I also use GW Get to help with decoding those faster speeds. CW decoders are not foolproof, and a combination of decoding in my ears and on the screen is usually required.
I did OK on Saturday. I found AH2R, Guam, which is a country I have struggled to work. They showed up in last weeks ARRL DX Report, so I knew to look for them. Hopefully they will upload to LoTW eventually, otherwise it may have been a waste of time. I operated off and on for a few hours. I looked at my last years results, where I had 178 contacts (reduced to 174 after log check), and it looked like I had no chance to beat that.
Sunday came along and I started to operate again around noon. First on 10 meters. I did pretty well, and moved to 15. Again, conditions were pretty good. Once I start hearing the same stations, I moved to 20. As it was getting near dark, I went to 40 meters. Surprisingly I passed 178 contacts around 4:30, and ended up with 203, with 105 multipliers for something like 63,500 points.
These ARRL DX Contests are odd, as the goal for DX stations is to work the US and Canada. In many parts of the world, depending on conditions, DX stations may not be able to work the US for much of the weekend, if at all. So it seems (from what I can hear), to be mostly Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. I did work an Australian station on 20 meters in the late afternoon who was strong, be he was the only one I heard.
I guess I enjoyed myself enough to stick with it and beat my last years score. I have no issues with not using my keyer/paddle. I use it for non-contest QSOs. I did learn a bit more about N1MM, such that I think I can do a presentation at our next meeting March 12.
