I hadn’t planned on working the ARRL International CW DX Contest this weekend, but got caught up in the action. I worked a total of about three hours in three separate shifts. As always, I worked only the 20m band.
This really was a helluva contest. I’d never heard so many DX stations on at any one time. And the beautiful thing is that the DX stations were actually listening for you! The only way they could score points was to work US stations.
Overall, I worked a total of 31 stations from 20 different countries. New countries for me included Yugoslavia, Turks and Caicos Islands, Bermuda, Aruba, China (!), Dominican Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, and the Slovak Republic. What a blast!
In addition to working all these cool countries, I’m happy to report that my code speed is increasing, too. I cranked up the keyer to send at 22 wpm, and my copying skills were nearly as good. Only a few stations did I have to copy multiple times to log their correct callsigns.
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