I spent a few hours in the CQ WW SSB contest this weekend. Mine wasn’t so much a contest effort as it was an opportunity to move the needle on my DXCC Phone totals, my weakest category by a wide margin. I had just 35 confirmed to my credit when the contest began so I assumed that almost anyone heard and worked was a potential new country on the mode.

Having a lot of other things to do this weekend I dropped out after just 50 contacts and that didn’t take long, it’s the most popular radio contest event of the year. Still, I was in early and the big dawgs weren’t yet scrambling for mults from an American station running 100 watts into a vertical and barely disturbing the aether. Many of my calls went unanswered from stations who were well over S9 here.

Those 50 contacts yielded 29 countries in EU, NA, SA, and AF.

19 would be new entities for me on Phone assuming they all confirmed our contact. I’m not holding my breath. My experience working contest club stations is that despite most claiming to use LoTW many will take more than a year, if ever, to upload their logs.

Despite a possibly dispapointing confirmation rate I’m still pleased with the potential outcome.

My log indicates that phone contacts account for just 4% of all contacts made this year. The opportunity to add even a small slug of new phone contacts on a single Saturday morning of tuning the bands makes the effort more than worthwhile.

Long before the contest had ended the paperwork was complete. My log has been submitted to CQ WW, and my claimed results uploaded to 3830. Nothing left to do now except wait and see if the LoTW results will reflect some upward movement.