CQ WW WPX

Bands noisy first night, much better second night. Three 'newbie' ops with limited experience. One of the ops for the upcoming Heard Island DXpedition stopped by to see how RTTY is operated, so will at least be familiar with it while on the Island.

Great to get back into WPX CW again after missing last year due to a wedding and station construction. We had a great crew and everyone seemed to have a good time for this one. Condx weren’t bad. Ten obviously left a lot to be desired, but we’ve gotta get used to that. Fifteen was fair Saturday and much better Sunday. Twenty was better in the late evening/early morning than during the day. 40 produced well considering the considerable shorter opening to Europe. As expected, with flux down, 80 was quite good and noise surprisingly low. Not much to be said for top band.

Contest started off miserably. Software put the contact times all over the place. I know this is going to kill our score. For a SFI of 125, 10 was a big surprise. My first EU QSO Saturday morning was
with IW9FRA at 1153 UTC, and we consistently made Q's on 10 for the next 12+ hours. Had a nice, but short 10m LP opening to Asia Saturday AM, with some JA's and one BY in the log.

Wow! What a weekend.

Found the bands extremely friendly, so everyone found a place to operate.
There seemed to be an almost limitless supply of new stations the whole weekend.

Had two operators who had never operated RTTY at all, and one other that had done so one a limited, casual basis. Two others had never operated from the Goat Farm before, so there was there was a bit of a 'learning curve' for several ops.

Regardless of condx WPX CW is always fun. This year atmospheric weather was quite good with fairly low noise on the low bands. Solar weather wasn't so good, but that's part of what makes things fun. It was a good weekend to know something about skewed paths!

A good time was had by all. Plenty of ops, plenty of sleep, plenty of food, plenty of drink and plenty of propagation. Late in the weeks, LOTS of ugly problems cropped up. Most were taken care of and the couple that were left, were not too bad. Friday afternoon, I discovered a S/N problem that would have killed the whole weekend for us. The crew at N1MM solved it and had a new version out in about an hour and a half. Big thanks to them!

Another terrific CQWPX CW has come and gone. It's going to be hard to beat this one. First we had four new folks operating with us. Aurelio PC5A and Frank ON9CC included a stay with us after Dayton. Hans PB2T/NB2T who is in the area on temporary assignment stopped by on Sunday. And last, but certainly not least, Pete N4ZR spent the weekend. Then, we can talk about conditions, but I think it's all been pretty well said. Ten could have been a bit better, but that probably would have been at the expense of 80 and maybe 160.