CQWW CW 2019 SO[A]SB80 HP M0BEW

CQWW CW 2019 SO[A]SB80 HP M0BEW
Contest         : CQ World Wide
Callsign        : M0BEW
Mode            : CW
Category        : Single operator
Overlay         : ---
Band(s)         : 80
Class           : High
Grid square     : IO82RJ
Operating time  : 32h 17m

 BAND  QSO  Z  C DUP POINTS  AVG
--------------------------------
  160    0  0  0   0      0 0.00
   80 1929 23 98 114   2897 1.50
   40    0  0  0   0      0 0.00
   20    0  0  0   0      0 0.00
   15    0  0  0   0      0 0.00
   10    0  0  0   0      0 0.00
--------------------------------
TOTAL 1929 23 98 114   2897 1.50
================================
      FINAL SCORE: 350 537

Comments.
TS590SG 400W. Dipole. Beverages.
Still wasn't sure what cat I was going to do for this even by Friday evening.
All I knew I was doing an entry to earn SCC points.

First session to sunrise was busy. First hour was a 170. With every other hour 100+ things looked promising. The western beverage was fabulous to use running Na.

Coming back to radio at sunset had two issues. firstly I lost internet connection losing assistance, this would not return for the rest of the weekend. Secondly the band seemed down to the east, very down.
I was hearing many far east mults on the East beverage well before darkness that I couldn't even raise a ? out of. Not really breaking the pileups there until thier sunset. It was a real struggle working to the East, which as a rule is not a problem direction from here.

Finding mults is hard without assistance in cqww. Most dx runners use the lack of signing to manage the pileup I think. So in between having to wait around for them to sign, and usually trying to hear them do this through a pielup of blind callers that clearly couldn't hear the dx very well was a chore.
Much of the dx moved around the band a lot as well not always being in the same place they were twenty mins before. I found it tough.

As I started with and used rbn in the first session I have to enter (A). However without it for the majority of the test my mult total finished quite poor. I did try hard to find new mults by tuning but clearly was not very successfull compared to what was actually available looking at the assisted guys totals. This failing will hurt my score a lot.

Overall lots of fun and good experience.

Tim M0BEW.