What is this?

At the end of 2025 I joined the Swamp Fox Contest Group out of South Carolina. It's a great group of folks who are very serious about contesting. One of the cool things they do is a club contest (SFOTA) that more-or-less is just a count of QSOs in contests.

As we are in the season of 'what could next year be like?' speculation, I have been thinking about how I'd like to measure my contest activity this year. Is it number of contests? Ranking in a couple of specific contests? Number of QSOs? And the more I've thought about this, the more I've thought about where and how I want to improve my contesting skills this year.

The thing that jumped out at me is simply that I need more experience. I just started contesting in 2025. In the early part of the year I played at some state QSO parties, but didn't put in tons of effort to any of them. Then around August I started trying some of the bigger contests. I did:

• NAQP CW
• CQWW DX RTTY
• JARTS WW RTTY
• CQWW DX SSB
• ARRL Sweepstakes CW
• CQWW DX CW
• ARRL 10 meter

But I didn't put in more than 8 hours on any of them. I did 5 hours on ARRL SS, 7 hours on JARTS, and 8 hours on CQWW CW.

So, then, the question for me becomes: what kind of goal can I set that will encourage me to get more experience? The answer, I think, has to be 'one that counts quantity, not quality', which leaves me with contest count or QSO count. Since I know that a kind of corollary goal for me should be amount of time participating in contests, measuring the volume of QSOs seems like the right choice!

CW

In 2025 I had a total of < 2K QSOs. I felt really active, and I guess in a way I was. I had the call KY4UH from 2023 to 2025, and in LOTW I have 934 QSOs with that call. With N4IIT I have 1,704. I didn't upload everything (with either call) to LOTW because I used a paper log for the first half of 2025, but that was dozens, not hundreds, of QSOs. So I was about twice as 'active' in 2025 as I was in 2024 based on the 'QSO count' metric.

This year, my goal is to double that again in CW contest QSOs. I would love to end up with substantially more QSOs overall, but this is my main goal for the year: 4000 CW QSOs in contests.

As I write this in late December 2025, I'm really excited about contesting in 2026. It should be a great year!