I have never operated this contest full time from home but was tempted
since for a number of reasons I have not been able to operate any contest
full time since the WAE last August. Things on the home front started
falling into place a few days before the contest though, so I thought I'd
give it a try. Thursday night before the contest I was pulling my dipoles
up to "contest height" and broke both my 80 and 160M antennas. Before it
got too dark I put together another 80M antenna and got it in the
air. Then, on Friday since the contest didn't start until 8 p.m. I got
another 160M antenna up. Even though 160 is not a big band for WPX, as it
turned out I got 3 prefixes on the band, so I guess the effort was worth
it. The downside was that I was really tired at the starting gun and the
prospect of sitting in the chair doing S&P for 36 hours was not
appealing. I got a bit of a boost when I worked a XW station on 40M but I
convinced myself that 20 was not going to open to EU and got some four
hours sleep early Saturday. I'm sure that probably cost me. I never got a
good run going until a little past 2100 on Saturday, when I had three good
hours on 20M. No EU on 10M, most were with South America although I did
get one ZS. With all the funky callsigns being used, several times I got a
"Hi Jay" when I didn't have a clue about who I was talking to. I only
worked one station on 6 bands -- guess who: NQ4I. Thanks to Rick's
gang. I heard K4BAI a lot more than I worked him. John was usually
zigging when I was zagging. The bottom line is, I'm now a WPX believer and
think I'll add this to my "must do" contests in the future. I made an
effort to work 80 and 40 as much as possible for the higher points but QRN
was pretty bad both nights. I didn't do as well as I wanted on 15. Most
of my QSOs there were 1-pointers.
Here's the summary:
BAND Raw QSOs Valid QSOs Points Prefixes
_____________________________________________________
160CW 5 5 5 3
80CW 35 35 80 13
40CW 278 277 784 154
20CW 613 607 1364 217
15CW 360 360 636 106
10CW 54 54 108 21
_____________________________________________________
Totals 1345 1338 2977 514
Final Score = 1,530,178 points.
73,
Jay/K4OGG
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