[UK-CONTEST] WPX CW - M4K

[Tim-M0BEW]

CQWW WPX Contest, CW

Call: M4K
Operator(s): M0BEW
Station: M0BEW

Class: SOSB20 LP
QTH: ENGLAND
Operating Time (hrs): 35

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
  160:
   80:
   40:
   20: 1801
   15:
   10:
------------
Total: 1801  Prefixes = 672  Total Score = 1,862,784

Comments:
Good contest.
This one is not at a good time for me. My birthday is on the 23rd so I seem
to spend half of the contest drunk and the other half hungover.
Station performed as I've grown to expect. Solid and competive towards the
east/south east and all round on shorter hops, and a complete dummy load
towards the west.
Only 339 qsos with NA and 35 with JA. Laughable really.
After using a decent station for wpx phone and the cqww's I can confidently
estimate I'm about 5-600 q's (and the mults that come with them) down from
dx areas. As I have no other choice, I can almost keep up the pace ratewise
making EU qsos, theres certainly enough activity,  but in the end the the
impact the 3 point difference has on the score is too much. But with the
present setup I have now I can neither hear them or they hear me. The joys
of suburban contesting.
Heard M0C and GS2MP many times while tuning, they always seemed to be
running heavily people I couldn't even detect, I had to try and put that
in the back of my mind and carry on what I was doing, but it's never nice to
hear.
I'm sure they'll have impressive scores. gl.

Got called by quite a few semi-rare calls which is always nice. Also ZS6DX,
who I gather from reading 3830 was qrp and only made a handfull of qsos on
20m. Nice to think I was one of the few he got in the log. Managed to run
across GJ2A when he had no pileup, would have never made it if he had.

Condx in my view were average, I'd say the second day was certainly better
then the first. We had a storm pass over with a tremendous amount of static
rain during Saturday evening, I checked out and took an hour break while it
passed through. Seemed to expereience a slight glitch Sunday morning,
signals here became very attenuated during 0700-1000.

Once again, niggles on trying to hold run freq's against people who were way
out outside my filter. Seems unfair when I'm struggling to work the few DX
stations I can hear calling me near my noise floor when I'm getting qrm from
someone with an overly wide signal who would clearly be getting nothing back
from me. Quite a few times I'd have say s7 of qrm (not always clicks, but
actually being able to hear their tone) and I'd tune away to check their
signal and they would be quite a distance way, and at zero beat be almost
the same signal. It's quite easy to put it down to overload during peak
times when they are 40 over 9, but during the times when EU start to drop
away and the signals start dropping below s9 you can hear the problems are
still there.

Great activity all round which allowed to me keep putting calls in the log,
pity condx didn't pick up that little bit more so I could make it into a
few extra layers of NA but I supose this is the reality now the cycle is
declining. We're getting to the times when that extra 10db makes all
the difference.

Tnx everyone who called.
Tim-M0BEW