I worked a little of the North American CW QSO Party last night, making 50 contacts in an hour and 40 minutes. Not great, but not bad. I scored 32 multipliers, including 3 Canadian provinces and Mexico.
I mostly hunted and pounced, but tried calling CQ for a little while with not much success. I guess I didn’t have a big enough signal last night.
I wonder if hunting and pouncing wasn’t the best strategy, anyway. I heard a lot of stations just calling CQ over and over, and not making many contacts. Some of them didn’t even seem to be listening for calls. They’d pause for just a second–barely enough time to hear a station calling–before calling CQ again.
As usual, there were stations who had strong signals here, but who just didn’t seem to hear me. I’m not sure what the deal is with that. I worked many stations who were rather weak here. I don’t know if the stronger stations were just ignoring me or if they were just deaf or what.
Another thing I was confused about is the timing of the event. The rules say that the contest was to last from 1800Z August 7 to 0600Z August 8, 2004, or 2 pm EDT Saturday to 2 am EDT Sunday. When I tried to find some activity on 40m on Saturday afternoon, though, I didn’t hear a single station working the contest. There was plenty of activity when I got home from the movies later in the evening, though.
Overall, though, it was fun. And to top it all off, I did work a station whose call spells a word: W4ARM in Miami.
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