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Indeed, the 2012 DX contest was fun. 48 hours of it, well, no, I still require sleep and since I’d chosen to work Single Band and that band was 40 meters, the days were free. The band closed here about 7 AM and refused to open until a few minutes after 5 PM, despite my best efforts.

I’d say the only drawback of the contest, for the DX side, is that as DX I can’t take advantage of all the other DX on the air during the day in order to carve some notches toward my second DXCC award. I’ll have to wait for the May WPX for the next good harvest.

About 14 hours of on-air time during the weekend is my guess, which gave me a good average Q rate of over 40, though at times it was as high as 65 Qs/hour. The biggest dry spell was the last session on Sunday, when I only worked 23 stations (not counting dups) during the final 50 minutes.

Some random observations:

• What is up with all the jamming? Maybe half a dozen times either an SSB’r would start howling or making other strange noises for half an hour or more, or someone would put their key down, which sounded like they were tuning up, but for 30 minutes? 
• Worse than the jamming, which I could filter out, were big guns who couldn’t hear me and decided the frequency was clear and started belting out CQ TEST right on top of me. In some of those cases I just had to relinquish the frequency, no way around it.
• Don’t work, at least as a runner, when you are tired and the calls start to run together. I did that Saturday night because I was so close to my personal goal of 500 Qs that I didn’t want to stop. I was having to ask for more fills than usual and was mistaking N for K even. Really, it got pretty pathetic.
• Utilizing some “advanced” N1MM Logger macro features really helped move things faster, such as using the in-line speed-up tokens for “CQ TEST” and “599″.
• Using CQ Repeat in N1MM Logger is a two-edged sword. It’s great to have your CQ going out hands-free, but inevitably I’d forget to switch it off and walk over the other op when they answered.
• The first day you don’t see it, but by the second you start getting Dup-itis. I simply work them again, it’s just as fast as telling them they’ve DUP’d me. Only one op dup’d me more than once, in fact 3 times, which makes me suspicious that it was intentional.
• U.S. station call sign zones are not well correlated to the actual State they are in (due to the vanity system I guess), but Canadian ones always were. A corollary to that is that I noticed many U.S. stations gave me a State code that did not match up with their FCC address as reported in QRZ.com. Does the contest tabulator check this when matching exchanges? 

Overall, I worked 608 stations with a multiplier of 53, not bad considering I stuck only to 40 meters and that this was my first real contest. Once I’d gone well over 500 Qs I realized I could make a new goal of hitting 100,000 points, but it was not to be. I ended up with 96,672. I’m about to submit the log after I get one question answered by the ARRL about which mailing address should I use in the log (or does it really matter?), my Stateside FCC address or the one here in C.R.

I’m looking forward to the next DX contest and plan to spend even more time with RufzXP to improve my call sign copy, though I’m sure it will never be as good as the true DX’rs.