[3830] CQWW CW VE3NNT SO(A)AB HP

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                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW - 2021

Call: VE3NNT
Operator(s): VE3NNT
Station: VE3NNT

Class: SO(A)AB HP
QTH: FN14cm
Operating Time (hrs): 41
Remote Operation

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:   87     9       11
   80:  848    21       72
   40:  935    27      100
   20:  868    27       85
   15:  585    26       88
   10:   66    13       32
------------------------------
Total: 3389   123      388  Total Score = 4,649,078

Club: Contest Club Ontario

Comments:

We closed the cottage 2 weeks ago. I was thinking about reopening it to be able
to operate the station locally, but in the end chickened out and ran the contest
remotely. The cottage road is treacherous once snow arrives.

The internet held up very well for the entire contest, maybe due to some changes
I made this summer. Of course, I had to deal with the audio delay. It was enough
that I would very frequently respond to a caller just as he was sending his call
a second time. Then I would have to resend his call after sending the exchange
to trigger his response. This happened probably about a quarter of the time,
which slowed my runs down a lot.

I was curious to see how much my score would suffer operating remote. As it
turns out, I ended up with exactly the same number of contacts as last year, by
coincidence, not choice. My score was slightly better due to a higher
multiplier. During the last hours of the contest, I spent more time hunting
multipliers, at a cost of fewer contacts. Rate was still quite high near the end
of the contest, so I'm not sure if my time would have been better spent running
up a few hundred more contacts. 

Conditions were reasonable. It was good to find a short opening to Europe on 10m
Sunday morning. I still need to put up a better 160m antenna though. Last year I
was using an inverted L with a folded counterpoint. This year I used an inverted
V. My problem is receiving, not transmitting. I think I'll put up a second wire
antenna in the spring and play with the DX Engineering phasing box to try to
reduce my noise level.

You can tell that conditions further north are tougher. I heard Art, W1AJT, work
Guam but I just couldn't break through the pileup and gave up after several
minutes.

I operated through Friday night without sleep. I only got 4 hours of sleep
Saturday night. When I got up Sunday morning, I could tell that the neurons were
not connecting well. I started a run on 20m and I felt like I was drowning in
the sea of calls, like I was thrown in the deep end and didn't know how to swim.
It took me a good half hour to get back into the zone again. It didn't help that
by Sunday morning, the Europeans were so wound up that they called incessantly,
non-stop. I put out a few calls and what came back was a wall of sound, steady
for a good 30 seconds, all on about the same frequency. I couldn't decode a
single letter in my degraded mental state. I guess I was fresh meat for the
piranhas.

I always had the feeling that I have a big fat pipe into Africa, beaming
directly across the surface of our lake. This was confirmed. With the pileups on
3B8M, I managed to get through on my first call on 5 bands. I don't do so well
to the north west. Asia can be a struggle. I missed some good multipliers out
that way.

All in all, I had a great time with this marathon event. I'll try to do it from
the cottage next year, which always yields better results.


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