[CQ-Contest] Looking at my log

[Tom Frenaye]

I like to look at my Sprint CW logs after a contest to see what I can learn from them.   Usually it's a simple look at QSO rates, missed multipliers, and sometimes QSOs per minute on each band.   That helps me find out where my strategy or plans didn't work as well as I had hoped.  

This last CW Sprint was frustrating from the northeast.  20m closed very early (only about 40 minutes of useful time there), and 40m was a real zoo with the 3Y0X pileup (7023 up 5 or so) along with the CQWW RTTY contest (7030 and up).   80m was very good, and very quiet, but most people don't usually go to 80m until 90 minutes before the end of the contest, and there are a finite number of people to work on each band.

Anyhow, I decided to play with the log in MS Excel and put together 4 graphs I thought might be of interest.  Thanks to N6TR for posting them.
               
www.kkn.net/~tree/sprint0602-k1ki.pdf 

The graphs were easy to do and did show me a few things.   The first one just shows my band changes - not many because I'm not a SO2R sprinter.   The other three show the frequency used for QSOs made on each band.    What is interesting is to see what happened on 40m, with all but 3 QSOs between 7010 and 7030 (On 20m the range was about 25 Khz and on 80m I worked people across a 30 Khz range).

It is also interesting how clearly you can see that my usual style of operating is to tune from high to low.   You can also see where I made two QSOs on one frequency (work someone who was CQing, then work someone who answered my CQ), and two places where I didn't move the VFO quite 1 KHz before starting another "couplet" of QSOs.

I tune from high to low because I got used to CW using LSB when using a TS930 (or was it a TS850).  And now I set my Ft1000mp to listen on LSB so it works the same.   I think most people tune the other way - low to high - because the default on most radios is for CW to be USB.  Hope I explained that right.

After the contest I found some station problems on 20 and 40m, so it wasn't just propagation, 3Y0X and RTTY that caused my lower than usual score, some was self-inflicted...

When doing search/pounce for QSOs, do most people tune only one way?  Mostly low to high?   When I tune I like to hear a new signal starting with a high pitch, the I stop when it gets close to 450/500 Hz.   

                     -- Tom


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Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444