I enjoy radio contesting, I’m just not good at it.

I’m not highly competitive and hold no illusions about ever being a “top” contest operator. I’m the guy who when we swap total contact numbers in the exchange has 43 worked while you have 1359. I’ve attended Contest University a couple of times and I know the basic mechanics of contesting, I just don’t take it seriously enough to amount to much.

That has never been more apparent than while reviewing my 2022 CQ WW DX CW Log Check Report. I only spent a few hours in that one and my goal wasn’t some impressive contest score (good thing!), I was really looking for select entities that I needed on CW. I worked 130 stations, several of which were needed making it time well-spent. I claimed a score of 41,514 which included 77 countries and 34 zones.

But the check log results exposed a few critical errors that would be even more humbling had I been trying to make a serious effort of it. After review, my score dropped to 28,462, a 31.4% reduction due to several critical errors.

3  (2.3%) not in log
9  (6.9%) incorrect calls
0  (0.0%) incorrect exchanges
0  (0.0%) missing exchanges
0  (0.0%) duplicates removed
1  (0.8%) calls unique to this log only (not removed)

The incorrect calls were CW copy mistakes like my logging ED7A instead of EB7A, etc. Those can be improved with practice, but I doubt I will ever be completely accurate copying 30-40 wpm over several hours, but clearly more work is needed here.

14014 CW 2022-11-26 1226 KE9V     04   HA7IB    15  correct HA8IB 
21020 CW 2022-11-26 1256 KE9V     04   SA9A     14  correct HA9A  
21028 CW 2022-11-26 1533 KE9V     04   TM6T     14  correct TM6M  
 7014 CW 2022-11-27 0245 KE9V     04   ED7A     14  correct EB7A  
14015 CW 2022-11-27 1310 KE9V     04   SH7DX    14  correct S57DX 
14033 CW 2022-11-27 1317 KE9V     04   SA8A     14  correct HA8A  
21039 CW 2022-11-27 1354 KE9V     04   SH0R     14  correct S50R  
28054 CW 2022-11-27 1654 KE9V     04   EA5LS    14  correct EA5RS 
21020 CW 2022-11-27 1838 KE9V     04   ED7A     14  correct EB7A

On the other end there were three stations who copied my call incorrectly as KE9E, KE9H, and KE8V.

I’m still pleased with the outcome since I managed to add several new DXCC on CW during the event, but I’d like to add some focus on this particular facet of the hobby. There certainly is room for considerable improvement.