The contest ended on Sunday afternoon. I am ready to share my thoughts about CQ Worldwide CW for 2017. It’s a short episode recapping the biggest contest of the year.

The radio room is still a little unkempt after a solid weekend of amateur radio contesting over the November 25 and 26 weekend. If participation went according to recent trends, we had more than 8,000 contestants from around the world in the CQ Worldwide DX CW contest – it was a Morse code feeding frenzy for many of us, and I enjoyed every single second on the air.

Here in the radio room I still have a few coax jumper cables laying about, and my ears are still decoding Morse code in anything resembling a pattern of noise. It’s all over but for the ringing in my ears and some should’ve-would’ve thoughts.

First things first. How did I do, compared to my goals? The short version is I did a lot better than I ever thought I would.

I went in with a simple and — at the time last week when I divulged my predictions — lofty goal of 1,500 Qs, 150 multipliers – that’s the total number of CQ Zones and DXCC countries worked on each band — for a 500,000-point score.

I managed to finish with 1,989 contacts, 228 multipliers and 970,000 points. So I’m happy. I don’t think many people expected the bands to be as strong as they turned out to be. I sure didn’t.

It was so much fun I ended up putting in my longest-ever CQWW CW session — 37 hours is one more hour than I managed in 2012, which was my previous iron-pants record for this contest.

Thanks to some short-ish naps at just the right times — but not sleeping a lot longer than planned — I don’t feel too beat up at the finish line. Sure needed a LOT of coffee through the weekend.

Working the world

I think the best surprise was a ZS station from South Africa calling me on 15M during a US run Sunday mid-morning. the band shouldn’t have supported that path but the signal was loud and probably on a skew.

Going into the contest I was curious to see how the HQ9X lads would make out from Roatan, a Caribbean island off the Honduras mainland. They were booming in here every time I worked them (80M through 15M). If I ever get to retire, that’s the place for me. Verticals on the beach, and nothing but blue water to the horizon. Dream on, I guess. The XYL says I can go any time I want. And take the dog with me.

By the end I had netted 75 countries, so not even DXCC from here, but it was fun hunting for countries anyway. It would have been better if Saturday had not been so rough. I really missed Europe on 15M – all I was able to get on 15M across the Atlantic was a single Zone 33 in north Africa. Oh, and that lovely South African surprise.

I loved some of the runs on 15M and 20M. On Sunday afternoon I worked 418 stations in one session — peaking with a 60-minute rate of 185 per hour — before moving to 40M for the final hour or so.

The AL-80B amplifier here ran like a champ, but the sturdy old SB-221 was great until I needed to go to the AL-80B for 160M. Then I just left the 40-year-old Heathkit resting for the remainder of the contest.

Sidetracks

About two of my 11 off-hours were spent on gear. When I wanted to run the second radio (on 40M) while running on 80M, I couldn’t get it configured for about an hour. CAT wasn’t working properly, until I realized the radio was in memory mode not VFO mode. Duh. Fixed, and had a great time with dueling CQs on 40 and 80 for about three hours from midnight to 3 a.m. when it was slow enough to stay on top of things.

I would have made a lot more Qs on a single radio without the down-time getting the SO2R figured out,