2012 CQ WW 160m contest Results

 This contest starts at 2200 UTC which is 4:00 CST Friday for Me. I did turn the radio on but only found a few stations operating and they all were very weak. It's still daylight here now until almost 5:30 so I decided to eat Supper and do some chores and walk Our dog before trying the bands again. I finally was back in the shack after 6:00 CST and even though the band was noisy, I managed a steady stream of S & P contacts.Feeling conditions still were not optimum , I took several breaks on and off before calling it a night . I'm not a night owl , so I might have missed some of the best operating time, but thats the way it is!
  Saturday night wasn't much better, in fact because lots of the calls were the same from Friday night, the Q's were few and far between. I tried running several times but felt like I was speaking into a wind tunnel and had few takers. This contest is usually a fun one because of the congenial operators and most have excellant ears. I was amazed at how many could pick out My puny signal! I do wish conditions had been better. The noise and washed out signals left  the whole contest with a not completed feel! I did exceed My totals from previous years but not by much. I had hoped for a good improvement because of My inverted "L" antenna. I compared it with My dipole and the "L" was hearing more than the dipole by a large amount. I do think some TRansmit issues reared their ugly head-- My little B&W tuner appeared to struggle to the point I need to take it apart looking for arcing! Not good! Definately need a better setup for next year!
 totals- 72 Q's,32 mults for a score of 5,712-- no DX ! :((
73---Tim