Station  Op    Call   Category   QSOs    Mults   Score
----------------------------------------------------------
N3BB    N3BB    N3BB    SOHP     1299     80     207,840 
K5NA    K5NA    K5NA    SOHP     1265     80     202,400
W5KFT   K5PI    W5KFT   SOHP     1238     80     198,080
K5YA    K5YA    K5YA    SOHP      916     78     142,896
W5RQ    W5RQ    W5RQ    SOHP      770     80     123,200
N5AW    N5AW    N5AW    SOLP      601     80      96,160
K5NZ    K5NZ    K5NZ    SOLP      557     75      83,250
N5AW    W5ZL    W5ZL    SOLP      515     76      78,280
K5IID   K5IID   K5IID   SOLP      500     77      77,000
K5OT    K5OT    K5OT    SOLP      417     78      65,052
W5JAW   W5JAW   W5JAW   SOLP      306     74      45,288
KG5U    KG5U    KG5U    SOQP      689     79     108,704

"I can remember when I was afraid to do the CW Sweepstakes. It seems that the older I get, the more I enjoy CW contests. That is not to say I am a good CW op, because that is not true, and I've never been accused of being one either. My fist has always been terrible. Anyway, I had a great time! I had forgotten how much fun it is to operate the Sweepstakes from this part of the country. Super fun!" - K5IID

"As evidenced by my band breakdowns, 15 meters was its pretty usual awesome self, while 80 meters was absolutely drop-dead beautiful! 80 meters conditions Saturday night/Sunday morning were so good, it seemed like I couldn't make myself not be heard. Virtually everyone I called answered and >90% had no fill requests. CQ runs were fair to better-than-S&Ping. In retrospect, I wish now I had turned on the function in TR Log that identifies in the log which were CQ and which were S&P QSOs. I'm betting that in this contest, 25% or more were CQ QSOs." - KG5U

"I'd say conditions were good overall, but with a few oddities. 10 meters was open, but it didn't offer the broad propagation that I wanted to keep the rate up, so I stuck to 15 meters and 20 meters. Ah, but then there was 40 meters. Working 40 meters in Sweepstakes is so nice because you can work stations at quite varied distances. I didn't think I'd do much on 80 meters, but the noise level was low, and there were plenty of people to work. I was glad to have some locals in there duking it out." - K5PI (@ W5KFT)

"40 meters was especially good to me this year, because I have always had low QSO numbers there before in the CW Sweepstakes. I slept about four hours before getting back on around 1300 UTC. That was a mistake, because I should have been back earlier milking the morning crowd on the low bands. About 1500-1600 UTC on Sunday, the bottom dropped out when a flare or something bad happened to the bands. The rest of the day, I had to listen to raspy and watery signals. It made it really rough to get exchanges, especially on back-scatter signals." - K5NA

"I took the time to learn how to do SO2R with WriteLog. This was my first serious effort using two radios. I spent several hours of the second day doing SO2R. I think I'm pretty comfortable with it now, but I'm not ready to try it in the first few hours of the Sweepstakes contest yet." - K5YA

"I just couldn't stay away from the CW Sweepstakes this year. We got home from our HC8 trip late (almost midnight) Friday night - and I was still pretty tired from the travel. I unpacked the Kenwood TS-850 on Saturday morning, and decided I'd better check it out before putting it on the shelf. So, I put it temporarily on the front seat of the truck and hooked it up. On and off again sessions in our driveway, and one trip over to the Dell Diamond parking lot, kept me occupied for about 10 out of the 30 hours of the contest. Let me tell you - it's pretty hard to hold a frequency when you're running low power and the bands get busy. Try it with Hustler whip in a mobile sometime! Whew." - K5OT

"After putting in a full time effort in CQ World Wide Phone the weekend before, I did not intend to enter the CW Sweepstakes seriously. Gary W5ZL was to operate from my station. On Friday, Gary called to say he could not operate Saturday but could Sunday - perhaps we could do a multi-op? I have neither an amp nor packet but agreed to operate the first 12 hours if Gary would operate the last 12 hours. However, when Gary showed up on Sunday morning and I had made only 600 QSOs, we decided our M score was not going to be competitive. Gary thought it would be more fun to use his own call as `fresh meat' rather than having 600 stations already worked. We did not realize that by ARRL rules this is not legal - two calls can't be used from the same station in one contest if they use the same transmitter. Apparently, had Gary brought his own rig, his QSOs would have been legal, but since he used mine they were not. So W5ZL's 515 QSOs were for naught as far as score goes. It doesn't seem quite fair, but that's the rule. I understand why it was put in, but perhaps it's time for a modification?" - N5AW

"This one will be my best, I suppose. 40 meters and 15 meters were the QSO bands. 20 meters accounted for about half as many QSOs as 40 and 15, and 10 meters was open but too `thin' in terms of footprint. 80 meters was open too, but not many casuals were there, and I had worked most of the `players' before. But, it seems there always are some new guys in there. Looking at the band totals, I suppose I worked a lot stations on 80 meters after all, but it didn't seem like it at the time." - N3BB

"I had an absolute ball operating Marv's station. This was my first `real' experience with an Orion (wow!) and his SteppIR beam (major wow!) since he got all that going. Despite the late start, the funky conditions, and a rather leisurely approach to the day, including fairly frequent breaks and a nice long walk out in the `back forty' where Marv has two new towers about to be planted, I did OK for me - 515 QSOs and 76 multipliers. I never got MB, YT, VI, or AK, and I thought I might end up dead before ever hearing an SC station, but then worked two of them back-to-back in the last hour." - W5ZL (@ N5AW)

"I planned to get on for a few hours Saturday afternoon during peak hours. Blame it on the Aggies, who showed early signs of upsetting Oklahoma, that I didn't make it on that afternoon until half-time. Then I snuck in about 20 minutes of operating for 36 QSOs. Then the UT-Oklahome State game came on. I almost turned it off and started SS'n when UT fell behind 7-35 in the first half. Jan and I went out to Houston's for a quick bite. When we got back, I figured I would go upstairs and see what was going on in Sweepstakes. I decided to check the TV and see how bad the score was and saw that UT was driving down the field as the second half started. Well, you guessed it. The most amazing comeback I've seen in many a year kept me on the couch. It was after 10:30 by the time I finally made it to the rig." - W5JAW

"40 meters and 80 meters were going wild. Apparently there was virtually no atmospheric activity anywhere across the country, and the signals were outstanding -- and there were lots of 'em." - W5RQ