CQWW CW 2022 M/S All-Band PJ4A

My friend KU8E invited me to operate with K4BAI, K4AB, and himself at the PJ4G station in Bonaire. I haven't done a real contest operation from the Caribbean since PJ2Z in 2001 so I jumped at the opportunity. The flight schedule to Bonaire is limited with at the time three flights a week, Wednesday before the contest being the one we picked. Do to some fog issues of all things at the Miami airport flights were being diverted and delayed. K4AB's flight got sent to another airport because of fuel. Mine landed but had the Bonaire flight not been delayed I probably would have missed it. K4AB wasn't able to work out alternatives and returned home. It would have been fun to operate with K4AB, he is a very good op. We also had Peter PJ4NX come and operate with us and he did a very good job on the mult-station.

We decided on just doing M/S, given that the other station on the island PJ4K was doing M2 and had more operators. We also decided not to install the rx antennas so we wouldn't be exhausted before the contest. Given conditions, we really didn't miss much but probably would have placed higher had it been easier to hear on the low bands.

It was overwhelming at times to pull calls out with 10s of stations calling at once. I think I did OK, but had some issues with using the Yaesu until I figured out the DNR was turned on. Also I usually operate in ESM mode in N1MM+ and neither of the other ops used that mode so switching operators was a bit slow because I had to check some boxes to get into that mode. I need to relax more and get into a flow, when I was able to do that the contacts were quick and I would hit over 200 q/h but it was difficult when someone would QRM or just weren't able to copy cw well. I found that increasing code speed > 35 wpm would help but I was nervous about making logging errors.

We placed 4th in the world from a pretty casual entry. Congrats to P33W, ZF1A!, and LZ5R. Would really like to see the ZF1A setup, they did really well. P33W is on another level from what I have seen.

Score

• QSOS: 7361
• Zones: 183
• Countries: 623
• Score: 16,826,600