Last year, we did a recap of the QSO statistics for the year. We found it interesting, so we did the same this year.

The QSOs are not exactly evenly distributed throughout the year. Instead, a few weeks account for a large proportion of the total QSOs. There are two weeks with more than 2000 QSOs and 5 weeks with more than 1000 QSOs. This is due to large contests falling in these weeks. The peaks in weeks 6, 13, 21, 39, 43, and 48 correspond to the CQ WW contests, while the RTTY-bar in week 11 corresponds to BARTG RTTY.

It does not surprise anyone that the contests where we get the most QSOs are the CQ-sponsored ones, but the already-mentioned BARTG RTTY contest is also high on the list. In 2025, we put in an extra effort there, which gave us a 1st place in the Multi-Multi class. Looking at the total number of QSOs gives us an indication of both how active each contest is and how invested we were in it. Let’s look at the peak rate per contest as well:

This is naturally not a perfect contest activity metric, but it evened out the highly skewed ratios between the big and small contests in the previous graphs. Still, no surprise that the big contests where we operated Multi-Two are at the top. Perhaps a bigger surprise is that SP DX made it into the top 5.

We did the most SSB and RTTY, and they even have a surprisingly similar percentage of ~40% each. The next one is CW, which amounted to ~15%. This is an increase in CW-QSOs compared to last year, mostly due to our participation in CQ WW CW and CQ WPX CW.

As the graph at the start of the post showed, we seem to prefer the day bands 15m and 20m.

Looking at bands and modes is quite interesting, but let’s also have a look at who we talk with:

The DXCC-zones of each QSO are resolved from the callsign, so there might be some errors for exotic countries. Nevertheless, it is evident that we have reached 6 out of 7 continents. Most of our QSOs are naturally from Europe, with Germany being our most common QSO-partner country. The US also stands out, as one of only four countries with which we have more than 1000 QSOs, and the only one outside Europe. This likely reflects the high density of radio amateurs there. We can have a look at how many different bands we reached each DXCC-zone on to have a slightly less biased assessment of how easy it is to reach the country:

Most of Europe is reached on 5 or 6 bands, perhaps a tendency for eastern Europe to be more often 6 and western Europe to be 5. It is the 160m band that is the difference in these cases. This is possibly an effect of us being more active in the early Norwegian night than in the late Norwegian night. In the evening, there are night conditions to the east and still day conditions to the west.

Last year, this graph was dominated by Ukrainian stations, but Norwegian stations seem to have taken over this year. This is possibly because we participated in the Norwegian CW contests in 2025, which we did not join in 2024. Many Norwegian contests are divided into sub-periods that allow us to work each station several times on each band. This gives us relatively many QSOs with other Norwegians who participate in all contests.

It is interesting to consider who we talk to, but we can also look at statistics about ourselves. We can e.g. have a look at how many QSOs our recruits got:

Just shy of 10% isn’t bad, but it could probably be more. Or we can have a look at the gender of our operators:

A 65% male ratio is higher than in the general population, but probably lower than for many other radio clubs. The final graph included here today is the band throughout the day plot:

It indicates that we get most of our QSOs during the day, likely due to both conditions, and that we are more often awake then. While most of the 80m/40m QSOs are during the night, it is obvious that it is possible to get QSOs on these bands during daytime. There is even a spike in 80m QSOs around 14.00 UTC, probably due to the afternoon periods of the Norwegian contests. There seems to be a spike in QSOs around 13.00, which we find to be strange. It could be around that time that some of the 24-hour contests start, and it is when the already-mentioned afternoon periods of the Norwegian contests start. Perhaps it is also a good time of day to run the contests that we don’t participate in competitively.

Not all statistics are well represented in a graph, so here is a summarizing table:

Total number of QSOs:15023
Number of unique operators58
Number of days with at least one QSO73
Number of DXCC-countries reached143
Number of band-countries reached439