11/19/2007 | K5BZH Due to unforeseen circumstances, I had to miss this years CW SS. My wife is chasing states and had planned to work the Fone SS to fill out most of her remaining states, but found herself in a hospital. I spent a limited amount of time working the Fone SS. Adding to the entertainment, my voice started giving out early in the game.

As a comment, living in the West Texas section certainly adds pleasure to Sweepstakes. The activity here is much lower than it should be and consequently many are looking to find WTX to move closer to a clean sweep.

I have heard comments since living in the WTX section that I never encountered when I lived in the North Texas section. Examples include: Great, I needed West Texas! Will the West Texas station move down 3 KC? Thank you for West Texas, I needed that one. Thanks for the new section.

The funny thing is I never worked WTX myself; usually get a local here in Amarillo. Didnt work NTX or STX either. Missed OK and NM too. Someone else noted Maryland activity, I worked several stations in MDC too. It didnt seem to take much effort to fill the California map, as a matter of fact over 10 percent of my Qs were to the SCV section.

One of these days I hope to improve my antenna farm or add a linear to enable me to hold a frequency to allow me to significantly increase my contact rate. Search and pounce has its limitations. While many use S&P to find new multipliers, I have heard many sections I needed using S&P working the guy holding the frequency. Too many of these I never logged before the contest ended.

I still had fun in this years contest. I made 162 contacts, worked 54 sections, and my raw score was 17,496 points. See yall next year. 73, Jim -- K5BZH