A follow up to my earlier posting on this topic (see below).
Yesterday evening after posting my previous message and this morning I started reading the 3830 postings. I’m screwed. My score definitely won’t be in the top 10 box this year. I’m currently #13 claimed (see 3830). I really feel bad because I thought I made the most out of the cards that were dealt. What went wrong? Basically if you don’t win a contest that means others have done better. So why did they do better? Let’s not take the setup into account. Apart from the 80m antenna there was no change from the antennas used in 2007.
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Location. Typically ON is not so good for EU centered contests like EUHFC and EU Sprint. The top 15 right now is populated by South-Eastern and some EA stations. DL3TD did good but he operated from a big station. F5IN is pretty close to me too and also seems to suffer on 10+15. He had a dozen mults more than me combined. Has better antennas too (especially on 40m). DL6FBL @ powerhouse DR1A said he couldn’t run 10/15 either.
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Would raising the yagi another 6m (15 > 21m high) have given me more score on the higher bands? My experience tells me that for EU this can be counterproductive. Can the 300-400 QSO difference really be explained by propagation? If I look at F5IN, it must be that. He says he was active for 10.5 hours. I took a few breaks (too slow to stay focused) and combined I think I lost an hour too. He has more multipliers so maybe he did more S&P?
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Obviously I reacted wrong on the 10/15m disaster. I ran like crazy there last year and made over 300 QSO in 3 hours. Then everyone moved to 20m where we could run again for 2 hours. That gave me almost 600 QSO in 5 hours. Now I needed to spend all that time mainly on 20m because it’s too early to go to 40m. But in he mean time, it seems that the top scorers were able to make more out of 10/15m.
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That meant that when I was on 20m, I could not capitalize the two higher bands. By the time I QSY’d to 40, maybe those guys dropped to 20m where I couldn’t hear them again? And what about 80m?
I should check all this when the logs are out in a few months. But by that time I probably won’t care anymore. The only thing I will care about is: when will we have at least a handful of sunspots? And right now on a more decisive level: is it worth to do WAE CW next weekend when you can’t even work EU on the bands?