Wow!....What a test

The big events of fall in ham radio are the CQ magazine contests. This weekend we had the CQ WW RTTY contest. Every year a lot of people are traveling to hot spots as Caribbean, North West Africa, Galapagos and so on, just to have the best conditions to win the test. On the other hand a lot of hams around the world are waiting to contact with exotic call sign and rare ham radio entities just sitting in their ordinary shacks. The bands get on fire for 48 hours. I cannot express the feeling of having so many stations on the air on usually quiet bands. You can change thoroughly your opinion about propagation just participating in this event. I made 811 contacts in SOAB category, 300 more than last year. Among them very rare dx countries. That is exactly the reason I join the test every year. And I can say this one was a very rich one. Spiros (SV8CS) was working only in 15m and during the contest we had a lot fun chatting about how the things were going. By the end of weekend we found wide open the 10m band, a band that is dead for years. It kept an hour or so but it was enough to work South America and Caribbean stations and the famous HC8N. What a pleasant surprise! MixW was a real performer and the FT1000MP as well as the ACOM1000 worked without complains. But most of all what made the difference this time was the Honor Roll plague in front of me....