so i finally sat down for a serious chunk of CQ WW SSB last weekend and wow. i've been licensed about 14 months and done a little bit of Field Day stuff with the club but never really operated solo in a big contest like this. i wasn't even planning to submit a log i just wanted to see what the bands were doing.

ended up working like 47 countries in about 4 hours on 20m and a bit of 15m which i know isnt impressive to most of you but for me that was kind of a revelation. kept hearing zones i'd never even thought about, worked a couple of guys in africa and one station in the middle east that came back to me on the first call which felt pretty good.

the rate during the peak hours was insane though, some of the big contest stations were just running and running and i had no idea how they were keeping up. also realized pretty quick my logging software setup was a mess and i was doing a lot of manual stuff i shouldnt have been.

anyway my question is - for someone who wants to actually do CQ WW or ARRL DX seriously next year, where do you even start with getting competitive? is it mostly antenna or is operating skill a bigger factor at lower power levels? and does anyone do SOTA activations around contest weekends to try and get both at the same time or is that too much to juggle

47 countries in 4 hours on a first solo effort is actually pretty decent, don't sell yourself short. the learning curve with contesting is real and most of it is just seat time honestly. you start to learn when to run vs when to search and pounce, when to move bands, how to deal with qrm without losing your mind.

antennas matter a lot, yeah, but at 100w you can still have a ton of fun and do well in your category. a decent dipole at reasonable height will get you a long way in CQ WW because the dx is actively hunting for contacts too, they want you as much as you want them during a contest. where it really starts to bite you is the multipliers you just cant hear at all, stuff thats in the noise that a station with a yagi would pull out easy.

on the SOTA and contesting combo - people do it but its kind of apples and oranges. SOTA activators can get spotted and chasers will come to them but running a pile in the middle of a summit activation while also trying to work contest contacts is a lot. i know a few guys who do winter field day from summits and kinda blend it but CQ WW on a hilltop with a handheld radio is not gonna go well for your score haha. keep them separate for now i'd say

the logging software thing trips everyone up at first. get N1MM+ set up before the contest and just run it in practice mode a few times so your fingers know where to go. when youre in the middle of a pileup is not the time to be figuring out keyboard shortcuts trust me learned that one the hard way during an ARRL SS a few years back.

Field Day is a great way to build the muscle memory in a lower stress environment too. our club does it every year and we always have a few newer folks sitting in and just watching how the experienced ops handle rate. you pick up a lot just by watching.