In July of 2025 I started participating in the weekly CWOps contests. It was incredibly slow going for me at first because of the speed and the fact that I was new to contesting, but it has been a ton of fun and I've really been improving my skills each month.

In September I had one incredible hour, relative to my previous results. Where before I had been getting 25 or 30 QSOs in the hour tops, in one September session I got 65 QSOs! It was frantic and fun and exhausting! It was also lucky: right session, right time, right propagation. I'm sure I'll get more than 65/hour at some point, but it won't be every hour!

That brings me to this page. In the 1900Z session on October 1, conditions were poor. Stations were faint, the band didn't look active. Since I had other things I could be doing and I knew I wasn't going to hit that high of 65+ QSOs, I only worked the first 20 or so minutes of the contest then moved on to do other non-radio things. This is, of course, 100% fine. I have a life outside of radio! But it did get me thinking about how I could keep trying to improve my results in the contest without having to have better and better rates (which is, at least in part, out of my control). I'm sure there are many ways to do this, but my thinking here is that I can track both the total number of QSOs I get for each month as well as the average. That might be interesting to look at as I think about propagation, and hopefully I can see that hour average slowly going up over time. There are 4 CWT sessions a week, but only 2 are really workable for me (one is usually free for me and the other sometimes is; the other two are just too late for my current schedule). I'll try to increase the total QSO count by working more sessions and try to increase the average by giving good efforts for the entire hour!