[SECC] WPX-CW K4OGG

[John Pryor]

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