CQWW-CW from an HOA; Anan-10E vs. Hermes Lite 2+

I went into the contest with the goal of testing the performance of the HL2+ in crowded CW conditions.

Rather than writing a dry narrative of "How I spent my weekend" (actually only four hours of it), I'll just sum it all up in bullet points:

Comparison on CW of Flex 6300 and Apache Labs Anan-10e

For the past eight months I've had essentially two separate stations on my desk - the Flex 6300 with an Asus desktop PC and the little Anan-10e connected to a small Dell laptop. Either (and both, at times) feed the Elecraft KPA-500 amplifier when needed.

Without my consciously planning it, the Flex has become my CW rig and the Anan-10e has been dedicated to operating FT8. This makes sense since the Flex is the better CW rig.

A recently purchased splitter allowed me to make comparisons of both rigs on FT8 and WSPR a few months ago (those results are here). The results surprised me and generated a lot of email. A subsequent comparison (between the Flex and a small RSPDuo on FT8 and WSPR, here) also produced surprising results.

But digital modes only produce numbers, ie SNR, as comparative values. The human element - actually hearing the signal - is missing and, until last night, I had not compared the rigs on CW.