[UK-CONTEST] IOTA Contest

[Ed -- GW3SQX]

Propagation was reasonably good for me in the IOTA contest, and for everyone 
else, I suppose.  I decided to enter a (previously) little-occupied slot, 
viz:
IOTA fixed (EU-005), Single-op assisted, CW, 12 hour, Low Power.
(Who said there were too many sections in this contest?!)

You might think that 100w was not enough to compete with the big guns, and
you would be partly right.  You have to use various strategies to get
yourself heard -- something well-known to the IOTA 100w DXpeditioners, of
course, and (I think) easier on CW than SSB.  When running, you can try to
find a slot near the lower end of the band, where the casual callers will
probably start tuning first.  You are then subject to frequency stealers,
and you won't usually win -- curse, complain, then slide around and find
another slot.  Or you can move up to 40kHz or so from the band edge, find a
clearer place, and the lure of a 15-point QSO to attract callers.  Both
tactics seemed to work OK for me, and I had several >100 per hour runs on
20m and 40m.

The surprises came on 15m and 10m.  On 15m, rates from time to time were
almost as high as on 20m (although not for as long), with a good sprinkling
of multipliers calling along with the 3-point crowd.  There were plenty of
Europeans on 10m, and would have been more if people had troubled to check
the band.  VY2TT and VO1HE also made appearances on 10m -- I leave it to
the experts to explain what propagation mode that would be.

To get any sort of score in this contest, you have to work LOTS of
multipliers.  This is not as hard as it was, with many expeditions of all
types visiting islands all over the place.  Nonetheless, you can't afford to
spend 10 minutes on each one, so with 100w you have to pick and choose
whether to bother calling through a pile-up or move on.  As ever, some
"rare" multipliers were pretty bad at handling the pile-up, with lots of
unnecessary repetition as well as "QRZ?, 73, GL, Hello Fred", and so on, and
not much attention to actually pulling a station through and getting on with
things.  When calling efficient pile-up managers, you can use the old CW
trick of calling about 150Hz higher than his frequency, and you will likely 
get though 3rd or 4th time even with 100w.  If not, mark on the band-map and 
come back in a few minutes.

Interestingly, although I had previously been rather derogatory about
Assisted entries in the past, I quite enjoyed following up spots and
deciding whether to chase them or not.  But there's no substitute for
finding your own multipliers, and there were plenty of these to be had.
Part of the tactics (of course) involves setting aside time to search the
bands -- how much and when?  Having not mastered the two-radio technique,
I'm not sure if this can be done without sometimes taking time to stop
running and just search, but those apparently equipped with two brains might
let me know!

Enough waffling -- the statistics:

CALLSIGN: GW7X (op: GW3SQX)
CATEGORY: SINGLE-OP ALL LOW CW
CATEGORY-ASSISTED: ASSISTED
CATEGORY-DXPEDITION: NON-DXPEDITION
CATEGORY-TIME: 12-HOURS

Band   QSOs  Multipliers
80         39            16
40        194           38
20        195           40
15        142           21
10          80           18

Total:  QSOs-- 650, multipliers-- 133


73,

Ed, GW3SQX