I was interested to see if the new rule that allocated each UK region as its own call area would change the feel of this event. There’s no doubt that GW participants are in a big minority compared to England and even Scotland to a lesser degree, and that ought to make me more popular to the DX.

From memory the contest this year felt like any other when running the same category. Always a painfully slow start (still trying to understand why;-) with the usual ‘death by unanswered CQs and already-worked callsigns’ in the early hours of Sunday. I felt conditions might have been impacted by the solar geomagnetic activity that caused the aurora notification app on my phone to ping a couple of times overnight and lead to occasional difficult echoing on signals. 80m didn’t seem great but did give me three greyline ZLs. Best band here by a long way was 15m with 38% of my QSO total. I worked a few 5-banders including ZF2CA and G4SGX/6Y (just like last year!) and 4-banders included 5Z4VJ, 8P9YI, VP8TXF, ZL/G4BUO and ZL6HQ. It’s nice in this contest that you rarely annoy anyone CQing on Sunday to ask them to move. Mike 8P9YI bit my hand off but sadly I couldn’t copy him on 80 at the time although I knew he was there, and the same for Dave ‘BUO on 10m. There were some grin moments too like finding Don G3BJ on 40m working 9V1YC and successfully working James moments later by moving to the nearest clear frequency and CQing. It’s a tactic I find has a good hit rate and this was made sweeter by coming across a huge pile-up a short time later and finding James underneath it. I smiled and moved on.

Last year I was also 24 hour HP unassisted but how much reliance can be given to comparisons is a moot point. There are rule changes which hopefully improve the attraction; certainly there seemed lots of VE activity and unfamiliar callsigns this year with an increase in VE Qs from 62% to 67%. I worked 30% more QSOs overall this year and unique calls went from 110 last year to 156. My shack and mental acuity haven’t improved and no-one is shouting about how amazing conditions were this weekend so maybe we GWs *are* more popular now?  

Thanks for all the Qs and an appreciative shout-out for the travelers. See you next year, inshallah…

73, Stew, GW0ETF

 BAND QSO DUP BONUS HQ POINTS AVG
———————————
   80  26   0    16  6    230 8.9
   40  56   1    28  9    525 9.4
   20  84   0    40  8    805 9.6
   15 121   4    45  9   1175 9.7
   10  42   0    19  9    385 9.2
———————————
TOTAL 329   5   148 41   3120 9.5
=================================
       FINAL SCORE:  6 900

K3/Gemini HF-1k (800-900w)
Hexbeam, 40m single vertical, 80m dipole at 14m
DXlog