Results of the 2020 CQWW RTTY DX Contest

Six months into the worldwide pandemic with DX location travel restricted globally, remote operating innovation to keep DX and Multi operation QRV, new players and alternative operating locations were the theme of the 34th annual CQ World Wide RTTY DX contest.

In September 2019, I think it’s safe to say there was no way we could have predicted where we would be as September 2020 approached and we realized we were in the clutches of the worst pandemic in over a century, completely changing the landscape of worldwide DX contests. Many contest DXpeditions to very familiar prefix areas were scuttled, including mine! This left some operators scrambling to make their home stations ready for the contest, looking for safe in-country locations, or — even worse — cancelling operations completely.

However, the pandemic did not deter the contest innovation and spirit of hams worldwide. There was a different effect that the pandemic had on our contest community as well. New operators to RTTY, as well as some more prolific contesters now homebound and spending more time on the radio, chose to take on the 2020 CQWW RTTY DX (as well as other radiosport events). This safe and “socially distant” activity presented an opportunity and a chance to dip their toes into the largest RTTY contest in the world, resulting in an astoundingly large 3,655 submitted logs, approximately 550 more logs than last year.

The prevalence of remote operating grew more and more sophisticated over the last decade, but it really rose to the occasion this year. As broadband connections have become more prevalent worldwide, transceivers and