[Amps] CW Activity

[Jim Brown]

I'd be interested to hear your definition of "hopping." I've been a CW 
op long enough to remember when the CW bands REALLY WERE hopping all the 
time. What I hear when I turn on my radio, hooked up to BIG antennas can 
only be described as "hopping" when there's a major DXpedition or a 
major contest. I've got dipoles for 80, 40, and 30 up more than 100 ft, 
as well as four Beverages and phased RX loops. My SteppIR is at 120 ft. 
If there are signals on the band, I hear them. Aside from contests and 
DXpeditions, I rarely hear more than a handful of CW QSOs on any band at 
the same time, and at least half of them are QRPers who seem to believe 
that 10 WPM goes with QRP.

On most bands, there is FAR more activity on JT65 and JT9 than on CW. 
This past winter, I let WSJT-X run 24/7 on 160M, and each morning 
entering calls of all the stations I decoded into a spreadsheet. My goal 
was to finish QRP WAS on 160 by working VT and SC. In about four months, 
I logged more than 950 different stations in all states but VT, in most 
VE provinces, on all continents and in more than 20 countries. I 
regularly copied a VK6 (near Perth, about 8,000 miles), occasional EU, 
AF, and several LU and PY most nights. At any given time, there were a 
dozen or so stations active. Except during contests, it's unusual to 
hear more than a couple of CW stations at the same time, and they're 
usually calling CQ and getting no responses.

I'm near San Francisco; if I were anywhere east of W0, I'd bet that I'd 
have at least 50% more calls in that JT65 log.

73, Jim K9YC

On Fri,4/28/2017 4:06 PM, w8hw at comcast.net wrote:
> That is just not true at all. The Cw bands are hopping all of the time.