Message sent to 3830 soon after the contest:

This is a revised posting. We had an enormous screwup with the log and, once discovered and fixed, lost over 400K points. Apologies to the other M/2 entries -- there was no intent to deceive. We just plain screwed up. (We notified the FS5UQ crew immediately when we found our log problem.)

Our Sob Story: At 1604Z on Saturday we experienced about a half second power outage. Everything stayed up except the computers and the Ethernet. I hurriedly restarted the machines and network while the crew paper-logged, and responded in the affirmative (as usual), to Writelog's query about
whether we wanted the journalled file of QSOs added to the log. After the restart, the Q and mult totals on all machines agreed, so I assumed that the
recovery had been successful. We went merrily along, and I went back to bed to resume writhing and moaning from a stomach virus that took me out for
much of the contest.

A day after the contest, when the log was being reviewed, it was discovered that we had almost 370 bogus QSOs logged, most of which were dated 18
February. The log was a mess, beginning at the 1604Z point of the power failure. Most of the "real" log was missing from the #2 run station
networked copy. Dissecting what had happened we finally realized that our test log, with which we were practicing prior to the contest, had been
factored into the live log at the time of the power drop. In that log, we worked AA1AA, AA1AB, AA1AC, VY2JA (dreaming), some VO2s, a VY0, and the
callsigns of a lot of silent keys. The practice log on one of the machines had apparently not been properly closed, so that hanging journal file ended
up in the real log.

I need to emphasize that this is NOT a Writelog glitch. Writelog did EXACTLY what it was supposed to do. We've used Writelog for years at PJ2T with nary a glitch, ever. It's stellar software. Like an aircraft accident, this was a result of several pieces of serial misfortune, mixed in with a bit of stupidity. Had the test log been properly closed on Thursday, or had the power bump never occurred, or had our only software and logging guy not come down with the stomach virus, we would not have had this problem. As it is, we missed three EASY mults on 10 simply because we thought we had them, from the journalled practice log, when in fact they were bogus Qs. As a result, we never even attempted to chase ND, PEI, or NF on 10 as we thought they were already there. Additionally, the VE8 and VO2 that I thought the 10 meter op had worked sometime Saturday morning when I was really sick were bogus.

Congrats to K3LP and the rest of the FS5UQ team on the apparent win. They did a superb job in spite of lots of equipment glitches. Superb work also at
PJ4R and J7OJ, in a classy memorial operation to K4OJ. Looking at the claimed scores, all four of the high-profile M/2 stations BEAT THE M/Ms!! As
a group, we're the highest-scoring stations in the contest on the DX side, by far. This shows the incredible high level of competition on the DX side
in ARRL CW. We've been trying for this plaque for eight years now, and one of these years it will go our way. 

I was pretty discouraged by our computer glitch until late Friday evening, when I was notified by my employer, on the last possible day, that I had
qualified for a three-year early retirement, with a significant financial pot-sweetener attached, and that I'll be unemployed on 30 May. This after 13
months of waiting and hoping, it comes on the last day of the qualification window. Suddenly the radio contest seems not so important. :)

We'll be in there swinging in ARRL SSB, trying to defend last year's M/2 win.

It was fun -- thanks to everybody for the Qs.

73 from Paradise,

- Geoff, W0CG (PJ2DX) for N1ZZ, W8TK, W0NB, and W8AV; the ARRL CW PJ2T Team