Four Hours Asleep, Then Australia: WW Digi DX Contest 2026
- 5 min reading time
307 QSOs on 20m and 40m FT8 from the home station for WW Digi DX 2026 — an FT-450 at 80W into the G5RV, a four-hour-nineteen-minute sleep gap in the middle of the night, and a 9,946-mile contact with South Australia less than half an hour after waking back up.
- Contest: WW Digi DX Contest 2026
- Operator: Joe Leone, W4GGJ — St. Petersburg, FL (EL87pt)
- Logged: Saturday Aug 29, 8:05 AM ET → Sunday Aug 30, 7:47 AM ET
- Station: Yaesu FT-450 at 80W · G5RV · WSJT-X → QRZ Logbook
- Bands: 20m, 40m
- Mode: FT8
- Result: 307 QSOs — 202 on 20m, 105 on 40m
- Worked: 39 DXCC entities across 6 continents
307 contacts, two bands, one dead stretch in the middle of the night that was entirely my fault. I fell asleep at the desk and the radio sat there transmitting nothing for over four hours while half the world's pre-dawn openings went by unworked.
Two bands, all FT8, from the home station
This one ran from the shack — FT-450 at 80 watts into the G5RV, WSJT-X doing the decoding, everything logged straight through to QRZ. No field radio, no battery budget, no park gate to beat. I picked 20m and 40m and stayed there the whole contest; I never even tried 15m or 10m to see if they'd open.
First contact was KB1EFS in Massachusetts at 8:05 AM Eastern Saturday morning. From there it was mostly 20m through the day — the best single hour of the whole contest came about half an hour later, 32 QSOs between roughly 8:37 and 9:37 AM.
The four hours I don't have an excuse for
Somewhere around 2:43 AM Sunday I fell asleep at the station. The log confirms it: nothing between 2:43 and 7:02 AM Eastern, four hours and nineteen minutes with the radio idle while I was out. That's not a strategic sleep break — I didn't plan to stop, I just stopped.
Everyone who's run a contest through the night has some version of this. Mine happened to land right across the stretch of overnight propagation I'd have most wanted to be awake for.
Waking up to Australia
The first QSO back was WU8T at 7:02 AM, and the very next one — one minute later — was VL4A in Australia on 40m. Twenty-four minutes after that came VK5MK, Mark in Aberfoyle Park, South Australia, also on 40m: 16,007 km, 9,946 miles, the farthest contact of the entire contest, worked less than half an hour after I opened my eyes.
I'll take it. Four hours of nothing, and the first real DX of the morning was on the other side of the planet.
Once the map's laid out like that, the two-band decision looks better than it felt at 3 AM. 20m carried the bulk of it — 202 QSOs, most of Europe, South America, and the domestic run. 40m picked up the overnight and early-morning DX, including every Australian contact in the log. Germany and Brazil tied for the most-worked country outside the US at 12 each, and the only African contact all weekend was 3B8HK in Mauritius.
Final numbers
- 307 QSOs — 202 on 20m, 105 on 40m
- 39 DXCC entities across 6 continents
- 187 unique grid squares
- Farthest contact: VK5MK, South Australia — 16,007 km / 9,946 miles, 40m FT8
- Best hour: 32 QSOs
- Hottest 15 minutes: 10 QSOs
- Downtime: 4 hours 19 minutes, 2:43 AM–7:02 AM Eastern Sunday, entirely me falling asleep
This is a log recap, not a claimed score — I didn't run a Cabrillo file or N1MM for this one, just WSJT-X straight to the logbook, so there's no official multiplier count to report. The numbers above are what the log actually shows.
What I'd do differently
Set an alarm. That's the whole lesson. I know better than to trust myself to stay awake through the overnight hours of a contest without something external forcing the issue, and I didn't set one anyway. A 20-minute alarm cycle would have cost me nothing and gotten me back on the air for at least some of those four hours.
Would I do this contest again?
Yes. Two bands and FT8 only made this an easy contest to just sit down and run without a lot of station juggling, and 307 QSOs from a G5RV and 80 watts is a good showing for a weekend where I was unconscious for a chunk of the best propagation. Next time I bring an alarm clock to the shack, and maybe I try 15m to see what I left on the table.
73 de W4GGJ
Station used for this contest: Yaesu FT-450 · G5RV · WSJT-X