C6AQW Final Statistics/Wrapup

Total DXpedition statistics including the contest:

617 QSO's: 589 SSB, 28 CW

30M: 6
20M: 591
17M: 20

78 countries

After a few days of reflection, I'm not as disappointed in the overall results as I initially was.

Although it may not seem like much, I did successfully setup a portable DX operation with homebrew antennas by myself for the first time ever. This is significant to me because if you look up the word "appliance operator" in the dictionary, I believe there is a picture of me shown. My previous operations (VP2MW, ZF2TG, V31RR) all had antennas and stations already set up-I brought and set up everything myself this time.

Most importantly, to paraphrase Thomas Edison I discovered a 1000 ways NOT to do a DXpedition and have made several key learnings I will use on future operations such as:

1. Never arrive later than Wednesday for a contest that starts Friday evening. The day of arrival always seems to be taken getting aquainted with the surroundings and the real work doesn't begin until the second day. Arriving on Thursday puts too much pressure on getting things set up on Friday before the contest.

2. Have all antennas measured and tested before arrival, if possible. I spent way too much time getting the loops measured and tuned on Friday.

3. Doing everything by yourself is hard. Next time I'm going to try to get a helper, hopefully someone that can climb.

4. Know your location before going. Although I had done some research on Google Earth, it's hard to get a full impression without being there. If I had, I would have put the antennas much closer to the beach as there was easier access than I had thought. The flat location with no elevation was probably suited much better to verticals close to ocean than the loop and inverted vee I went with. Those extra dB's sure would have helped. Now I know why big DXpeditions do site surveys several months before they go.

5. Pick a location and a band suited to the contest you are operating. 20M from the Bahamas using low wire antennas was a competitive disadvantage. The Bahamas are too far west in low sunspot conditions to expect much from Europe with my low wire antennas. In general an island in the eastern Caribbean is a much better choice for CQWW. However, I think the Bahamas is an ideal QTH for the ARRL contests (ARRL DX, 160M etc) where you only work the U.S. For CQWW to have a chance from C6 you need either high directional antennas on 20M or more sunspots.

6. Directional antennas with gain are good, even on an island. Being on a Caribbean island with an exotic callsign doesn't automatically mean you are going to be loud. I took that for granted, not realizing the reason I felt loud on previous trips was due in large part to better antennas.

7. If you can't run BOTH U.S. and EU in CQWW you can't win. See above. I could run U.S. but couldn't run EU and therefore I had no chance.

All of the above said, I don't want to leave the impression I didn't have a great time because I did. CQWW is always fun and I'm one big step closer to getting this thing right.

Next stop Dominica as J75W in CQWW CW!!