02/27/2009 | N3QE Overall QSO count for this contest was lower for me than some past efforts, but 15M opening up to Europe on Sunday let me work many countries that I hadn't worked in a long long time on that band. 80M seemed less jam-packed too, letting me break through to Europe quite often. There were several big-gun European stations on 80M who couldn't hear me or other loud US stations calling them, but this seemed less extreme than the past couple of years.

Pileups seemed less thick and more efficiently handled than the past several years. K5D's decision to not operate CW was probably wise, because the spillover from that kind of DXpedition can really mess up a good segment of the CW bands. Still, VP6DX last year showed that a bunch of really classy operators on a DX-pedition can do an impressive job of working through pileups efficiently.

CW Keying speeds and ID'ing seemed more rational too. In the past several years many stations had computer-controlled keyers operating at insane rates, sometimes causing mis-keying (e.g. "BY1" when really "6Y1") or not ID'ing for extended period. There were still a few notable stations with defective keying but this was far less than the past couple of years.

40M and 80M were very open to Australia and New Zealand from my QTH in Maryland each morning.

Tim. -- N3QE