I participated in the CQWW DX contest / 2017-10-30

This weekend was the CQ World Wide DX Contest. This is indeed another phone (voice) contest, so I connected headset, footswitch and the remote head of my radio. I had some time to participate on Sunday early afternoon and Sunday evening. On Sunday afternoon the logical band to try was 20 meters, on Sunday evening 40 meters. In the end I made 51 contacts.

All I did was 'search and pounce', checking for stations calling CQ that I could understand good enough and transmit my call back to them in the hope they would hear me. Some stations had me on the first try, some took several tries and some never heard me. The DX that got away was a Kazakhstan station who could not decode my call even after several tries.

I used the yfktest contest software for Linux again. This wasn't very hard as yfktest has a standard definition for the CQWW DX contest.

I heard both serious contest stations and single operators just calling CQ on the air. Interesting was to work OH1LWZ/M who according to his qrz page is really contesting mobile from his car or bicycle.

For next time I have to check the compression and gain settings for SSB on my Yaesu FT-857D radio when using the headset.

Claimed results:

Band    QSO    Qpts   Dupes Countries Zones
-------------------------------------------
  20     40      48       0      15       5
  40     11      19       0       9       6
-------------------------------------------
 ALL     51      67       0      24      11
===========================================
 Total Score: 2,345

A few times I heard the contest call PA0AA of my radio club who worked very hard to get the antenna at the club ready for contesting, but only in the background when I was trying other calls. It would have been nice to get them in the log.

Update 2018-04-06: Log checking report in: 1 case where I copied the call from the other side incorrectly (which costs me points) and 2 cases where the other side got it wrong (which does not cost me points). Final score 50 contacts 53 qsopoints, 11 zones, 24 countries, multiplier 35 and final score 1855 points.

I notice that the claimed qpts differ between the output from yfktest above and the report:

********************** Results By Band ***********************

             Band   QSO  QPts  Zone Cty Mult

   Claimed    40M    11    17     6  10   16
   Final      40M    11    17     6  10   16

   Claimed    20M    40    48     5  15   20
   Final      20M    39    36     5  14   19

   Claimed    All    51    65    11  25   36  Score     2340
   Final      All    50    53    11  24   35  Score     1855

Update 2018-06-01: Final results: unchanged at 50 contacts, 11 zones, 24 countries, 1855 points.