I made a serious 31 hour CQ WPX CW effort, SOAB(ASSISTED)HP, only one radio,
but I Ran for only about 40% of the time. My sequence was to go to a new
band,
first work all of the spots, especially multipliers and high-pointers, and
when
I found an open spot, I'd run, then S&P for one or two passes, and then move
on
to the next band and repeat.
If there were 20 spots showing, typically only 10 would be legitimate new
contacts.
Five or six spots would be occupied by another station, or were just old and
vacant,
while the remaining 4-5 spots would be busted calls: two or three would be
errors
(like transpositions of prefixes or incorrect numeral in the call sign), but
at
least one or two would be intentional bad spots, as when an alphabetic "O"
in the
call was posted as a numeric zero.
(There were six or seven times I got a "B4" because I called a station
based on an incorrect call in a spot, and he had not yet IDed his
callsign.)
When I found an unoccupied spot, I would send just "CQ" and wait 5 seconds,
then send
"CQ TEST" and wait 5 more seconds, and then send a full "CQ TEST DE W5GN" to
begin a run;
about half of those times, I got QRL feedback from just that first "CQ".
But in WPX, there just were never enough spots to keep me busy full time;
only
23% of time was I able to work spots.
I've tabulated my results comparing CQing, S&Ping, and Spots:
CQing S & P Spots Totals
QSOs 891 417 323 1631 QSOs
% of QSOs 55% 25% 20%
Minutes Spent 797 654 434 1885 (31.4 hours)
% of Time 42% 34% 23%
QSOs per Hour 67 38 45
New Multipliers 297 133 210 640 Multipliers
% of mults 46% 20% 33%
Mults per hour 22 12 29
Points 1609 966 960 3535 Points
% of points 46% 27% 27%
Points per hour 121 88 132
Points per QSO 1.8 2.3 3.0
Over half of my QSOs came from Runs, but that was only 40% of the contest
time, averaging 67/hr.
S & P accounted for 25% of my QSOs, averaging 38/hr, while spots accounted
for 20%, at 45/hr,
but even when there were spots to work, their QSO rate was only about 20%
higher than my S&P rate.
However, working spots was very productive for multipliers (29 per hour, vs
12 for S&P and 22
while CQing), and the average points per QSO was 3.0 for spots, 2.3 for S&P,
and only 1.8 for CQ.
The conclusion? I had a lot more fun because I had spots to chase, and
since my real purpose
was to test the new antennas (Optibeam OB16-3 on 10-15-20, Cal-Av 2D-40A on
40), those big
pileups on some spots were fine opportunities for me to swing the beam and
learn just how well
the antennas played!
Barry, W5GN
Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
President-Programmer
MXG Software
Merrill Consultants
10717 Cromwell Drive
Dallas, TX 75229-5122
homepage: www.mxg.com
tel: 214 351 1966 x 7
fax: 214 350 3694
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