Radiosport
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.