[UK-CONTEST] WPX CW G5W

[Don Beattie]

Ended up doing a single op effort from here - somewhat of a last minute 
decision (couldn't decide whether to do all band or single band) In the end 
I went for all band and just about managed to organise the sleep to stay 
awake for the necessary 36 hours and yet get a good crack at the darkness 
hours on LF and the double pointers.

Conditions were a bit of a mix - 40 was good, as was 20. 80 seemed OK, but 
of course with the WPX rules, it tends to carry less traffic. 10 was dead 
for most of the time up here (at least when I was on) but did give the odd 
mult on the Sunday afternoon into Africa/South America and even the US with 
ESP type signals. 15 was kind of OK, until Sunday afternoon, when it spring 
into life, and I had some great runs into the US for a while. But as would 
be expected, 20 and 40 did most of the work. Perhaps the great thing about 
conditions was the lack of any static on LF at this time of year - for a 
change.

About the same claimed score as last year (just a tad down - 100k in points 
and 8 in mults) which is disappointing.

Final result was 5.4M from 2608 QSOs and 817 mults. In retrospect I should 
have done more S&P as every time I tried it the rate stayed reasonably up, 
but the mult rate went through the roof. Something to remember for next 
year - lots more S&P unless the run is fast an furious !

High spots: (a) managing to stay reasonably conscious throughout; (b) 
getting more comfortable with the new SO2R box (although I should have 
worked more on that), and (c) some truly amazingly strong DX signals.

Low points: (a) some incredibly grotty signals - I fear there is a device 
available to fit to your tx, which adds noise sidebands, so no-one else gets 
too close - there are a lot of very "wide" CW signals in this contest. (b) a 
worrying number of dupe callers - and I forgot to change the default message 
in WinTest to "work dupes", so I ended up spending more time explaining that 
we'd worked already - silly mistake.

BAND   QSO DUP  PFX  POINTS   AVG

---------------------------------------------

  160      49       0       31      108        2.20

   80      213      1       80      499        2.34

   40      858      8      344    3048       3.55

   20     1107    12     266    2057       1.86

   15       373    2         94     887        2.38

   10           8    0           2      22         2.75

---------------------------------------------

TOTAL  2608  23     817    6621      2.54

===================================

TOTAL SCORE : 5 409 357

Usual gear here - 2 x FT1000MP +  2 autotune linears. EZMaster controller.
10 ele 40-10 yagi at 80ft, A3S at 60ft.
90ft vertical, dipoles and the ever-necessary K9AY
WinTest logging software.

73 to all

Don, G3BJ