My goal for this year’s ARRL CW Sweepstakes was make a “clean sweep”. This means working all ARRL and RAC sections, a total of 83. Well, I came close with 78 sections. The only ones I missed were nearby Arkansas and more remote North Dakota, Vermont, Northern New York, and Ontario North. Did manage to work quite a few rare ones — at least for me with all the Canadian provinces including Northwest Territories and Newfoundland. I even managed to find Nebraska, which has usually stumped me in past efforts.
Ended with 300 QSO’s after about 18 hours in the chair over 28 clock hours. I decided to shut down a couple hours early as I was beat. This results compares favorably to my results in 2011 where I ended with 20,000 points and 160 QSO’s with 63 sections over the 10 hours I invested.
My antennas set up was an 80 meter inverted V as a temporary antenna on my 35 foot push up mast. This was in addition to the Butternut HF2V 80 and 40 meter vertical and my Cushcraft MA6V 20 to 6 meter vertical off center fed dipole. I used Skookum Logger as my logging software. I entered in the “unlimited” category so that I could use spotting assistance to maximize my approach to finding those sections. It worked very well. The only section I heard but could not work was Arkansas.
I’ll also note that this is blog entry #100. Now for 100 more entries!
