CONTESTING
It’s obvious to most anyone who’s been on HF since March that single-operator (the most common entry category by far) contest activity is way up, as travel restrictions and health guidance resulted in hams spending more time at home. I was particularly satisfied in my single-op WPX SSB effort in March 2020 when I noted that had made 20% more contacts than I did in 2019. Then I started seeing 3830 score reports of other, better, stations showing an even larger increase in 2020 activity!
A broad, rather than anecdotal, measure of contest activity is the number of logs submitted. Contest sponsors make log submittal data public on the web, and everyone watched in amazement this spring as log submissions smashed all past records for several contests.
Table 1 shows the year-over-year growth in logs submitted to five major contests since lockdowns began in mid-March 2020. There is an across-the-board increase of at least 33% in participants in these big contests.
ARRL Field Day 2020 is a very special case: The ARRL made temporary rule waivers, for 2020 only, to allow class D (home) stations to work other class D stations for points. Because a typical Field Day class A station had three or more hams, it’s not surprising to see that logs submitted more than tripled. The rule waiver also allowed teams to aggregate individual scores into a club total. In an extreme case, the traditionally very large W3AO Field Day effort encouraged all
