so i finally did my first serious contest run during CQ WW SSB last month and i dont even know where to start. ive been licensed about two years and mostly just rag chewed on 40m with the locals, maybe did a couple SOTA activations which were great but very chill, nothing like this. my buddy kept telling me to try a real contest and i kept putting it off because it seemed like a lot of stress and honestly kind of overwhelming just listening to a busy band during a contest is intimidating enough.

anyway i sat down saturday morning with my IC-7300 and a wire dipole, nothing fancy, and just started calling CQ on 20m. within like the first hour i had worked stations in 12 different countries which is more dxcc entities than i had in my entire logbook up to that point. the rate was insane at times, like 60-70 contacts per hour which for me felt like i was barely keeping up. log4om was open on the other screen and i was still figuring out the macros midway through. total chaos honestly.

by sunday i was exhausted but had something like 380 contacts in the log and managed to hit every continent except Antarctica which i guess is just always going to be hard. already looking at the ARRL DX contest coming up in february and thinking about trying some CW runs which terrifies me but in a good way. anyone else remember their first big contest? does it always feel this addictive or does it calm down eventually lol

it does NOT calm down, just so you know. i did my first CQ WW back in like 2009 and i still get that same stupid grin when the rate meter spikes. 380 contacts on a wire dipole for your first time is honestly really solid, a lot of people quit after a couple hours when they cant figure out why nobody is answering their CQ. the trick you probably already figured out is finding a clear frequency and holding it rather than just search and pouncing the whole time, you get way more multipliers that way once the rate drops.

ARRL DX in february is a great next step, the exchange is simpler too just signal report and your state or power level depending which side of the border you are on. and yeah try the CW side even if youre slow, people are generally patient during contests more than you might expect, especially at lower rates on sunday afternoon. Field Day in june is a completely different vibe too if you havent done that with a club yet, more of a social thing but still a good time.

oh man SOTA and contesting are such different worlds right, i do both and sometimes i forget which mode im in haha. i was on a summit last spring during the start of a major contest weekend and the bands were just wall to wall signals, made it really hard to get my activator QSOs because everyone was running contest exchanges and got confused when i called CQ SOTA. still got the activation but it took way longer than usual.

congrats on the first contest though, 380 is nothing to sneeze at with a simple antenna setup. what logging software were you using? i keep going back and forth between n1mm and log4om for contests, n1mm is probably more standard for contesting but i just never took the time to really learn it properly.