I looked for the contest calendars but I can't find anything about the current contest that has pretty much taken over the bands here on the west coast. Unless all of the sudden amazingly expert (except for the transmitting on top of each other part) CW ops have come out of the woodwork it sounds like a bunch of people using software for TX and RX. Nothing less than about 40 wpm.
Sorry OM, your Google-Fu is weak tonight: www.contestcalendar.com Also, yes they do go kind of fast and you need good filtering to separate them out, but just jump in and see how you do. Just remember: usually the higher you go in the band, the slower the operators get. Not always, but usually... And in this contest, it's all about prefix's. So, AJ6 is a multiplier.
One of the year's biggest contests, and it was a lot of fun. 40 was cooking Friday night. 20 Saturday? Kinda weird...not always that great...and the propagation just seemed strange. I normally have trouble, for some reason, working Sweden from here--even in a contest. Saturday afternoon, I worked one Swedish station after another. Anyway, fun, and I put in enough hours to make me feel good about myself. Nothing like 30 years ago, but at least I did a little.
Most ops who at least do a little CW regularly certainly can. I mean, in a contest at 35 - 40 you're just copying calls and a few simple things (serial number in this one) and you know what's coming...it's not like you're trying to copy pages of QST during a code practice run of W1AW. In these latter days, my "comfort" speed for ragchewing is maybe 25 wpm on a good day, but contest operating is really no problem. I will say I find if I keep my sending down to 25 wpm or so I get a lot less of the "NR? AGN?"
Are you kidding me? I guess you've forgotten what it's like to be new to MC and still working at 15 wpm. Ha ha!
It was a BLAST! I operated my remote station in Germany as DK5TRI. 10m was cookin' in Europe, so was 15m. One of my favorite contests. Everybody just works everybody. Throw in some nice DX surprises and a good time can be had. I didn't hear many ops over 30 WPM which is what I run in the big ones. IMHO everything above is just showing off and does add more confusion than rate gain. Now just waiting for CQ WW CW in November . 73 Mike K5TRI / DK5TRI
