What a contest! Although heading to sun spot cycle minimum 10m surprised with excellent stateside openings on both days. JA was better on sunday than on saturday. JA opening was quite short, but with strong signals.

I managed to get some hours of sleep before the contest and so could stand almost full time. I only switched off on sunday morning for 2 hours, but this cost 80 QSOs maximum only.

The antenna work before the contest payed off and so I could run stateside on 40m for the first time :-) Even Zone 3 was possible. Receiving on 40m still is the difficult part, what a difference CW makes!

Also the 4ele SteppIR worked like expected. Now I have a real monobander on ALL bands between 10 and 20m. This saves me additional towers. Of course there is some interaction (15m) between the SteppIR and the XM240, because the stacking distance is only about 1,5m. But I think in real world this is hardly noticeable, otherwise this result wouldn`t have been possible.

More or less consequently SO2R-work somehow pumped up the rate during low RUN Radio rates. I called everyone who I heard on the 2nd radio, not only chased mults. This is the reason, why you can work more QSOs as single OP than a M/S station. They may work mults with the 2nd Radio only! (of course their mult score is much higher. A single OP can`t waste too much time working the low band mults --> "the last caller wins the pile-up" ...)

A SO2R-box helps a lot as it switches your headphones automatically to radio2 while sending on radio1. I think one becomes lazy, when switching by hand.
I use the ZS4TX SCKII for that, which now also works with N1MM software.

Many BIG scores in SOAB HP category this year, I hope to be top ten EU anyway... especially congrats to OE4A (Brako, OE1EMS) for his super score! 
It would have been easier in assisted category this year...

Some log analysis done by CBS can be seen here: CQWWPH04.TXT

See photos of the station at: Station Tour