This past weekend, I participated in the CQ WPX SSB Contest, and managed to do a lot better than I thought I would. Although they are not nearly the “official” results, by far, I managed to end up and #10 in the all band, low power category on the Contest Online Scoreboard.
The contest, itself, was a very long contest, lasting a total of 48 hours. I operated a total of just over 30 hours during the contest. I wasn’t “pushing it” during the time I was on, though, and did a lot of answering CQ calls. I tried calling CQ, myself, a few times, with very low results. I found that I had a much better contact rate when I was just answering them.
During the contest, I got a total of 305 contacts with 157 different WPXs. Basically, that means “prefixes”… the first part of the callsigns, including the numbers. My total points ended up being 74,261. I had 100 individual contacts on 80 meters, 119 individual contacts on 40 meters, and 86 individual contacts on 20 meters.
With such a long contest, and the changes in conditions during the contest, it is interesting to me that I averaged about the same amount of contacts for each band that I worked. I listened to 15 meters and 10 meters, but the signals that I heard were so weak, that I don’t think I even tried… if I did, I was obviously not successful.
A total of 249 of the contacts I made during the contest were in the USA. 6 in Hawaii, and 1 in Alaska. All of the others were DX contacts (even though, for this contest, HI and AK are considered DX), ranging from Canada to Australia to European Russia. (116 total confirmed at 01:10 UTC – April 4, 2019)
It was definitely and fun contest with a really easy exchange, and I will definitely plan on doing it again, next time. For now, I’ll just wait and see what the actual final results are. I don’t expect a plaque, but I will be getting a certificate, since I participated and submitted my log, already.