Gave away some points in the
Reseau des Emetteurs Francais (REF) contest late this evening. I think it was the French Championship: supposed to be for the entire weekend & 80m was jumping late on. I dusted off the ol' Bencher paddles (literally) and strutted my funky stuff with paddles for the first time in decades. It sure felt different to the pump handle...
NB: I was
not competing, I was simply giving away points. I was QRP but stomped up & down the bands like I was QRO. You know what? -They could hear me. Some brilliant ops got my call first time and blasted back 599+departement ID immediately, got their 599+index first time too. Pretty obviously some clubs were running multi OP+logger so they were fast, really on the ball but I guess they were also QBA & QBE stations. (That's Big Antenna & Big Ear stations.....).
For them, QRP didn't seem to exist; I got worked and fast!Some F5 & F6 statios were struggling gamely: either propagation was being unfair or they were single op stations with less QBA antennae in bad locations or /P. Couple of times, thanks to multiple repeats, calls and 599s were exchanged but they could not get my index number. It was then I went back to the straight key.
Why? because with a straight key you can be ....expressive. A keyer sends a perfect 'K', dah-di-dah. That's what you get, fast or slow. With a straight key you can send daaaah-di-daaaah. With 'R' you get di-Daaaah-dit, and so on. For reasons I don't understand, the straight key just gets through better when the going is tough. So, keyer for easy contacts, straight key for hard times. That's only my experience, YMMV.
In the small hours top band was jumping but I don't know the contest. Mostly it was U and R stations calling so I don't think it was the REF contest.
Tomorrow (Sunday) might be a good time to give away points because the competitors may be running out of fresh contacts..... 
Vic /off to sling his hammock... YAWNNNN!!!!!!
