PJ2T: World # 3 Claimed Score, Multi/Multi

 CQ WORLD WIDE DX CONTEST -- 2013

      Call:      PJ2T
      Category:  Multi Multi
      Power:     High Power
      Band:      All Band
      Mode:      CW 
      Country:   Curacao
      Zone:      9      

Contest Comments by N0YY:

What a fun weekend! Great contest, old and new friends, good food, good
conditions, what more could you ask for?

We had pulled together an international team and some highly experienced
domestic contesters with the hopes of improving our previous performance. We
knew that the M/M class, as the premium class, would prove to be difficult but
we set our sights on doing as well as we could and seeing where things would
fall. Congratulations to the D4C Team for their outstanding performance!

We spent the summer and early fall on station improvements adding dedicated
antennas to the Pacific, a new wire beam to the US, and a new rotatable
multiplier antenna. We added a triplexer to a new tribander dedicated to
Europe which paid HUGE dividends for the contest. For example, on 20M we
worked 10% more Europeans than US for the first time!

On a more local level, we knew HK1NA would be there for the race. At a minimum
we hoped to top the South American record set in 1999 by PJ4B. This was the
same year of the 70M points scored by CN8WW which was the target of the D4C
team. The bands were hot for the SSB weekend and we hoped that the conditions
would continue for the CW weekend.

While not as hot as the SSB weekend, we enjoyed high band propagation that has
been the best in many years. We pulled out all the stops and set our sights
high and hit the contest hard.

Murphy visited us with a 40M beam frozen on Europe and a noise source that made
20M night time contesting difficult, but we prevailed. We lost a keyboard on
one of the computers 5 minutes into the contest  but that was quickly
repaired.

20M and 40M were real horseraces for our team watching the rates and
the scores pileup was a lot of fun. Rates exceeded 200 per hour for periods on
each of the major bands. We had combined rates of almost 700 QSOs per hour a
couple of times for the five stations we had running.

10M JA runs brought smiles to the team as this was something almost foreign to
our operations for the past several years.

With rates like this we had to challenge ourselves to stop running and work
multipliers when we could. We left a few on the table as it was very difficult
to work our close in neighbors in the Caribbean on the high bands. We could
hear them, but we could not bust the pile-ups from the huge European signals.

10M did not last into the night like earlier in the week. (During the week
prior we ran Asia long path using our South American antenna well past 0130Z!)
But that was not the case for the contest.

When the dust settled we fell a bit short of our goal BUT we did set a
new PJ2T CQWW CW top score! This was our best performance EVER! A testament
to the station and our operating team.

Our closest competitor, HK1NA proved that the local propagation was consistent
for both of us with our scores being within 1% of each other. We will have to
wait for the log checking to determine the final standings!

Thanks to all that participated and for providing the Qs. And thanks for the
great competition. The levels keep improving and that drives our own
improvements! And it goes without saying thanks to Geoff for the
facilities and the Caribbean Contesting Consortium membership that make this
all possible.