As we prepare for the 2010 running of the WPX Contest, it is a good time to look back at the contest over the past year.
- WPX SSB contest sees generally poor conditions, but log entries end up a record 4087.
- WPX CW contest has much better conditions and sets a new record with 3649 log entries.
- June 27, 2009 marks the first posting of the Twitter feed. 158 Tweets since then cover the day to day activities around managing the contest.
- Added club name and location name matching to the robot. (See blog)
- In August, invitations to WPX survey are sent to over 9000 participants from 2008/2009 log submissions. Over 4000 responses received by end of September. Amazing response level.
- Decision made that any log with QSOs only on one band will be changed to single band category.
- Comment period provided for rule changes. Major rule change is to switch Multi-Single from CQWW style rule to 10 band changes per hour. (See blog)
- Number of WPX CW (2,224,164) QSOs exceeds 32-bit address space in PC memory! Log checking software moves to 64-bit multi-processor Linux server.
- November 1, WPX SSB results in mail to CQ Magazine. They appear in January 2010 issue. CW results mailed January 2 for appearance in March 2010 CQ.
- Created online score database with ALL log submissions for WPX SSB and CW from 1994 onward. Help from volunteers who typed in the line scores for years prior to 2001. All score record listings now generated from the online database.
- December 2009 created CQ WPX fan page on Facebook. now up to 538 fans.
- 2010 WPX Contest rules translated into 15 languages.
- New Cabrillo fields adopted to help with formatting of mailing addresses.
- W5GN mails out 1501 certificates for WPX SSB 2009. Another 1376 for WPX CW.
- Sponsors donate 120 plaques between WPX SSB/CW. K1DG handles donor management, production, and shipping.
- PVRC hosts “Inside the CQ WPX Contest” webinar on March 14, 2010. Recording available at http://www.pvrc.org/webinar/webinars.htm
We are very excited about the future of the WPX Contest and contesting radiosport in general. The increase in sunspot numbers should improve conditions and enable smaller stations to be more competitive. This should continue the trend of increased log submissions and we look for record number of entries on both modes again this year.
Thanks to everyone who participated on the air or contributed to the operation of the CQ WPX Contests.