On Saturday, there was a nice JA opening on 10 m with over 70 QSOs, the Caribbean came in already around 07:30z (long path?! antenna pointed east and signals strong), and plenty of Sporadic-E, even though the afternoon without an NA opening was quite slow. In the evening, there was a nice TEP opening to South America, even reaching up to 50 MHz. I really had to resist the urge to QSY. 😉 After 22:00 local time, the band actually opened toward North America, albeit very selectively. Still, a number of US multipliers made it into the log (also around 70).
For the first time I noticed that around 21z all signals from South America here had (probably multi-path) echoes! And everything further away, e.g. long-path to New Zealand, too. Holger, ZM4T, was really ringing and with his 100 W only 419 here anyway, which made things quite tricky – thanks for your patience! In general, a lot of DX was workable across the nighttime time zones, both east- and west-bound, which was super exciting (I had only experienced this on 20 m in summer before). I forced myself to bed at 01:00 Sunday morning with 700 QSOs in the log and under 5 QSOs per hour …
Sunday was much worse. No Asia and only a handful of stations from Oceania. The band was open somewhere via ES most of the time, but very “spotty” and with little activity. After hoping during the night to maybe reach 1200 QSOs, I was glad by Sunday evening just to surpass the one thousand mark. 😉 As usual, no chance against the competition down south, but for our latitude, the result should be quite decent.
One “first” was the operating time of almost 34 hours, whereas for 10 m Single Band entries it’s usually around 26–28 hours, occasionally 30 h. On Sunday afternoon, when almost nothing was happening, I even took a one-hour break just to be safe and not exceed the allowed 36 h, in case the band improved in the evening, having already accumulated over 19 h on day 1. 😀 But it turned out it wasn’t necessary …
CQWPXCW Summary Sheet
CallSign Used : DH8BQA
Operator Category : SINGLE-OP
Assisted Category : ASSISTED
Band : 10M
Power : HIGH
Mode : CW
Gridsquare : JO73CE
Club/Team : Bavarian Contest Club
Software : N1MM Logger+ 1.0.9546.0
Band QSOs Pts WPX Pt/Q
28 1030 1838 667 1,8
Total 1030 1838 667 1,8
Score : 1.225.946
Rig : Flex-6600 + PA
Antennas : 6 ele OWA Yagi @ 60 ft.