I am sitting here listening to the waning minutes of the CQ WW DX Contest. I expect that in 15 minutes or so; the bands will become eerily silent. For all the activity that has occurred over the past 48 hours; it makes you wonder where everyone goes when the contest is over!
I am listening to CN3A hand out QSOs on 40 Meters with machine gun like precision. I was very surprised to check my e-mail earlier to find that Spiros had sent me an e-mail congratulating me for busting the pileup with QRP. I did not mention that I was working QRP. I can only imagine that they must be checking calls with QRZ and they might have seen my bio, which includes a lot about QRP.
I did get another to bring the DXCC entity count up to 102. One of the countries I have been chasing all weekend long is Austria. As I've mentioned before, it's one of the bigger European nations that I have failed to work QRP. I have heard several OE stations over the past 48 hours; but had no luck. Then, at 22:50 UTC, I heard and worked OE9R. Amazing how the best ears get even better as the last hours of a major DX contest melt away!
In all, it was an excellent weekend radio-wise. I accomplished a long standing goal, which is great. And I had a lot easier time decoding those rapid fire call sign exchanges. All these years of operating CW and continually engaging in listening to higher speed CW seems to be paying off.
Now all I have to do is get busy with actually submitting for QRP DXCC.
73 de Larry W2LJ
What logging tool did you use?
ReplyDeleteHello Larry, you did a wonderful job working Morocco. I thought I didn't had a change to work the CQWW CW contest because of family matters this weekend. Eventually I worked the last two hours on 40 and 80 meters. I worked 31 stations: 15 DXCC countries on 40 m and 6 new DXCC countries best DX Lithuania 1284 km on 80 meter. Best DX on 40: Israel 3330 km. I am a happy man. 73, Paul
ReplyDeletePaul,
ReplyDeleteIt IS a nice thing to know that your signal gets out and that you are being heard! As many times as I have had proof of that, there's always that nagging "Am I getting out?" in the back of my mind - even after all these years. It's fun to make QRP contacts especially the long distance ones.
And to answer the logging question, pid, I use Win-EQF. I have been using it since the first generation of Log-EQF came out in 1992 or thereabouts. I have tired others; but always seem to come back to Win-EQF. I like the amount of memo that I can attach to QSOs. It makes it double as a Ham Journal for me in addition to just a logging program. I like AC Log; but for some reason, it hesitates on my computer. When I enter a callsign, tnere's a slight hang up before I can advance to the next field.