The 2018 CQ-WE Contest

ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL CQ-WE Contest has come and gone. The individual scores and official results may be found here.

Congratulations are due Tom Warren, K3TW, who won the latest contest by a landslide, finishing with a score that was over 2.7 times that of our second place finisher. I believe this is Tom's fourth win and is his third consecutive CQ-WE win. Tom also took High Phone.

John Drum, W4BXI, easily finished second overall, while also taking High CW. John is also an old hand in the contest with, by my count, seven prior wins under his belt.

Finishing out the top five are Ken Mitchell, KD2KW, Scott Slater, AG7KO, and Rob Stampfli, KD8WK. Tom Brown, W2EQ, took the honors for High Active Employee. Hugh Barr, K2YG, had the High QRP score and Alfred Frank Hanzl, K2AL, walked away with High Non-Bell and High Digital.

In an interesting twist, Non-Bell high scorer Al Hanzl, along with his brother and sister, Ken (W2IOC) and Joan, and daughter Lauryn (W2OLF) have produced this year's certificates which feature the Kearny location where their father (the original W2IOC), worked. These impressive certs have been emailed to all the participants, so if you feel you should have received one and haven't, let us know.

We hope you enjoyed this year's contest and we look forward to making another contact with you again soon.

HAVE A QUESTION about CQ-WE? Email the National Coordinator. Interested in discussing the contest or just want to keep in touch? Feel free to join Ma-Bell-Hams, a Yahoo E-mail Group where such discussions are welcome: Just enter your email address in the space below and click "Join Now!".

CONTEST HOST: The role of Contest Host is an important one, and we appreciate the time and effort the various locations have put into designing and distributing their certificates in years past. Want to highlight your location? Then please consider volunteering to design and produce the certs for our 60th contest year coming up. It's really not that hard, your name will be recorded for posterity on the website, and we'll even handle the distribution. So give it some thought; we'd love to hear from you.

HELP US COMPILE a Historical Record of our Bell System Locations and Ham Clubs: A big part of the CQ-WE contest is communicating with as many different Location Codes as possible. The locations these codes represent made up the once great Bell System. Today, many — actually, most — of these locations, along with their location-sanctioned ham clubs, are either defunct or a shadow of their former selves.

The CQ-WE committee is undertaking a project to resurrect and preserve a history of the various Bell System locations before this information and heritage is permanently lost. But, its success depends on you! Please check our Location Histories page, and if you can provide some information on a missing location — or additional information on one that has already been published — consider authoring a short article describing your location. If it supported a corporate ham club, please include your remembrances of that, too. Use the existing write-ups as guides for style and format. Please send your material to the CQ-WE webmaster, cqwe-web-2016@cboh.org, and we'll put it up on the web site to highlight your location for posterity, and even give you credit in the byline. By taking a few minutes to document what you know from your personal experience with AT&T and its subsidiaries, we hope to preserve some of the rich history of the many facets of the once proud and great Bell System.