Coming weekend the annual UBA DX contest is held, the SSB leg. I hate SSB and I don’t like that contest because the rate is low. Everyone is either in CQ WW 160 CW or REF CW. Aaahh yes, CW. Much better. Much more fun. Last year there were almost twice the number of SSB logs in CW (540 SSB, 850 in CW) and almost three times as much contacts (87k SSB versus 230k CW). The UBA CW contest coincides with CQ 160 SSB and REF SSB. So there you go: contesters big or small prefer CW.
Yet there is a sort of moral obligation here to participate. I usually play in the 12h category. ON can pick between 6, 12 or 24 hours. DX can only be single or all band. So how do I plan my activity versus my pauses? I have a “winning recipe”, being nothing more than the schedule I have been following for a few years now. It’s not a secret but I need to look it up in my little notebook. This evening I spent about 2 hours writing some code to see what the distribution of the contacts per hour is. That can help to plan the breaks, too. Most of the time went to formatting the numbers, writing the code to calculate them is pretty easy. Since I have access to the logs, it wouldn’t be fair NOT to share the information. I might throw it on CQ-Contest too. Here’s the result:
UBA DX SSB Contest 2009 – ACTIVITY PER HOUR
Number of logs: 540Absolute numbers
UTC 10 15 20 40 80 Total
————————————————————-
1300-1400: 8 18 6583 1545 95 8249
1400-1500: 2 0 4502 2476 304 7284
1500-1600: 0 1 3223 2484 653 6361
1600-1700: 6 0 2212 1502 1745 5465
1700-1800: 23 5 674 1252 2613 4567
1800-1900: 0 0 129 864 2746 3739
1900-2000: 1 0 171 754 2624 3550
2000-2100: 0 0 62 863 2632 3557
2100-2200: 4 4 96 753 2414 3271
2200-2300: 2 0 109 502 2151 2764
2300-0000: 0 0 73 279 1696 2048
0000-0100: 0 0 25 284 977 1286
0100-0200: 0 0 17 134 444 595
0200-0300: 0 0 11 90 220 321
0300-0400: 0 0 10 20 121 151
0400-0500: 3 0 66 111 173 353
0500-0600: 0 0 208 488 518 1214
0600-0700: 0 0 1002 1272 497 2771
0700-0800: 0 0 2819 1311 277 4407
0800-0900: 0 18 4520 1011 44 5593
0900-1000: 3 11 4621 860 8 5503
1000-1100: 4 19 4445 639 14 5121
1100-1200: 3 14 4243 685 3 4948
1200-1300: 4 8 3592 830 67 4501
63 98 43413 21009 23036 87619Relative numbers
UTC 10 15 20 40 80 Total
————————————————————-
1300-1400: 0,01 0,02 7,51 1,76 0,11 9,41
1400-1500: 0,00 0,00 5,14 2,83 0,35 8,32
1500-1600: 0,00 0,00 3,68 2,83 0,75 7,26
1600-1700: 0,01 0,00 2,52 1,71 1,99 6,23
1700-1800: 0,03 0,01 0,77 1,43 2,98 5,22
1800-1900: 0,00 0,00 0,15 0,99 3,13 4,27
1900-2000: 0,00 0,00 0,20 0,86 2,99 4,05
2000-2100: 0,00 0,00 0,07 0,98 3,00 4,05
2100-2200: 0,00 0,00 0,11 0,86 2,75 3,72
2200-2300: 0,00 0,00 0,12 0,57 2,45 3,14
2300-0000: 0,00 0,00 0,08 0,32 1,94 2,34
0000-0100: 0,00 0,00 0,03 0,32 1,11 1,46
0100-0200: 0,00 0,00 0,02 0,15 0,51 0,68
0200-0300: 0,00 0,00 0,01 0,10 0,25 0,36
0300-0400: 0,00 0,00 0,01 0,02 0,14 0,17
0400-0500: 0,00 0,00 0,08 0,13 0,20 0,41
0500-0600: 0,00 0,00 0,24 0,56 0,59 1,39
0600-0700: 0,00 0,00 1,14 1,45 0,57 3,16
0700-0800: 0,00 0,00 3,22 1,50 0,32 5,04
0800-0900: 0,00 0,02 5,16 1,15 0,05 6,38
0900-1000: 0,00 0,01 5,27 0,98 0,01 6,27
1000-1100: 0,00 0,02 5,07 0,73 0,02 5,84
1100-1200: 0,00 0,02 4,84 0,78 0,00 5,64
1200-1300: 0,00 0,01 4,10 0,95 0,08 5,14
0,05 0,11 49,54 23,96 26,29 99,95