The yearly tradition continues, and I had the pleasure of joining my club at this year’s CQWW SSB contest last weekend. Even though we mainly had two stations on the air most of the time, there were periods where we had three, so we ended up in the multi-multi, high power, all bands category. We used the special call LN2T for this contest, so if we’re in your log there’s a chance you worked little ol’ me!

Prior to the contest I was a bit concerned, considering that the conditions had been sub-par lately.

But, my oh my, how this changed for the better! All bands literally exploded with activity, and personally I’ve never witnessed this much activity on 10m before – in order to find an available spot to call CQ, I had to spin the VFO all the way up to 29,500 MHz! However, on the remaining bands there was no such thing as available room, and you’d have to use both your knees and elbows and literally wedge yourself into a weak spot and start calling, hoping for the best.

The downside with so many callers is that your CQ may go unnoticed, even if you have full power and shout as loud as you can. And when someone were kind enough to spot you on the cluster, Hell would break loose. I almost had to talk while inhaling and exhaling in order to work the callers quickly enough.

Sometime during Sunday we finally celebrated that our previous club record was beaten! There still were a few hours left before the contest ended, so we rolled up our sleeves and set course for the 4000 QSO mark, which we earlier thought was too ambitious. We made it, ending up with 4,061 contacts in the log (4,037 excluding the dupes) and the claimed score just crossing the 4 million points line.

We were five operators in total working for LN2T. Two were active whenever they could, and the remaining three ended up with a hoarse throat and bonus tinnitus. I swear I can still hear the “whee-whee” and “whoa-whoa” QRM on side frequencies, even off the air.

It’s apparent that CQWW is a game exclusively for the big guns. I honestly feel sorry for anyone working QRP or low power in this contest, and would imagine that any attempt at calling CQ would quickly be run over by some QRO station. Thankfully, there were so many stations calling that I guess only doing search and pounce for 48 could work. Who knows, maybe a “low power CQWW” could be a thing one day?

Thanks to all our callers, without you we wouldn’t be able to celebrate the new club record!