A huge number of analyses can be performed with the various public CQ WW logs (cq-ww-2005--2025-augmented.xz; see here for details of the augmented format) for the period from 2005 to 2025.
As in prior years, there follow a few basic
analyses that interest me. There is, of course, plenty of scope to use
the log files for further analyses, some of which are suggested by the figures below.
Below
are some simple analyses of
basic statistics from the logs. The 2025 versions of the contests showed more or less normal activity, following several years
disrupted by COVID and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The latter,
of course, is still under way, but its effect on the contest seems to be
decreasing. By the autumn of 2025, we were definitely past the peak of sunspot cycle 25.
Number of Logs
Until 2020, the raw number of submitted logs for SSB had been relatively flat for several years; the logs submitted for CW showed a fairly steady annual increase. In 2020, unsurprisingly, the number of logs in both modes increased to new record, almost certainly because of the pandemic; CQ WW SSB 2021 set another record; on CW, the number of logs decreased slightly, but would still have been a record were it not for 2020. 2022 was another year of unusual circumstances: not only was the pandemic still in evidence in much of the world, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with the CQ WW committee's vacillation on how to proceed in light of that invasion -- and then the protest against the committee's position as of the contest dates -- was always going to lead to a reduction in the number of submitted logs. In 2025, the numbers for both modes continued to bounce back up somewhat: on SSB they again set a new record, but on CW they still fell short of the 2020 peak.
Popularity
By definition, popularity requires some measure of people (or, in our case, the simple proxy of callsigns) -- there is no reason to believe, a priori,
that the number of received logs as shown above is related in any
particular way to the popularity of a contest, despite rather frequent
conclusory statements to the contrary in various corners of the Internet (or, indeed, in print).
So we look at the number of calls in
the logs as a function of time, rather than positing any kind of
well-defined positively correlated relationship between log submission
and popularity (actually, the posts I have seen don't even bother to
posit such a relationship: they are silent on the matter, thereby simply
seeming to presume that the reader will assume one).
However,
the situation isn't as
simple as it might be, because of the presence of busted calls in logs.
If a call appears in the logs just once (or some small number of times),
it is more likely to be a bust rather an actual participant -- but the
situation is complicated: some participants might a handful of contacts,
and select only relatively exotic calls for those QSOs. Or perhaps they
just worked their friends. Where to
set a cut-off a priori in order to discriminate between busts and
actual calls is therefore unclear; but we can plot the results of choosing
several such values.
First, for SSB:
Regardless
of how many logs a call
has to appear in before we regard it as a legitimate callsign, the
popularity of CQ WW SSB during the pandemic surely
increased from the doldrums of the prior few years. Complicating the
picture in the past two or three years is, of course, the reduction in
participation that is (presumably)
due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whatever the cause, the number
of calls certainly seems to be well down on the number at a similar
point in the last solar cycle
[I
note that a plausible argument
can be made that the number of uniques will be more or less proportional
to the number of QSOs made (I have not tested that hypothesis; I leave
it as an exercise for the interested reader to determine whether it is
true), but there is no obvious reason why the same would be true for,
for example, callsigns that appear in, say, ten or more logs. The
interested reader might also consider basing a similar analysis on
eXtended Super Check Partial files as created by the drscp program.]
Moving to CW:
On CW, we see that in 2022 the reduction due (presumably) to the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to the number of active calls being the lowest of all the years for which data are available. In 2023, and again in 2024, there was a slight correction; but the numbers of logged calls were still well short of the numbers during the high-sunspot years of the last solar cycle -- and in 2025 the numbers were essentially identical to those for 2022, the lowest year on record.
Give that SSB is faring somewhat better, it seems that the likely proximate cause is the removal of Morse as requirement for HF operating privileges that occurred in the 1990s, combined with the accelerating rate at which "old-timers" are becoming silent keys. It seems likely, therefore, that this trend will continue, and even accelerate, in the coming years.
Geographical Participation
How has the geographical distribution of entries changed over time?
Again looking at SSB first:
The number of entrants from zone 16 continues to recover, but is still well down from historical levels. The number of logs from zones outside EU and the US continues to be very small. This can be seen more clearly if we plot the percentage of logs received from each zone as a function of time:
On CW, most zones evidence a sustained long-term increase:
Again we see the expected drop in entries from zone 16 in the past few (invasion-affected) years, but other than that the situation continues more or less as before, with the percentages of logs from each zone barely changing:
It
is, I think, of some interest that the change in participation in zone
28 that is obvious on SSB is barely discernible on CW.
Zone 24 is very slowly becoming more common; but, really, it's hard to
argue that there have been any substantive improvements in the geographical distribution in the past 20 years.
Activity
Total activity in a contest depends
both on the number of people who participate and on how many QSOs each
of those people makes. We can use the public logs to count the total
number of distinct QSOs in the logs (that is, each QSO is counted only once, even if both participants have submitted a log).
For SSB:
This appears to show that we are past the peak of cycle 25. The peak number of distinct QSOs is lower in cycle 25 than it was in cycle 24, and just one year after the peak the number of distinct QSOs is about the same as it was two years after the preceding peak..
And for CW:
2025 was down about 10% as compared to 2024. Next year, it will likely be down to levels not seen for twenty years.
Running and Calling
On SSB, the ongoing gradual shift towards stations strongly favouring
either running or calling, rather than splitting their effort between
the two types of operation, finally appears to have reached some kind of
equilibrium. There was essentially no change between 2018 and 2019, and
even a (very) slight reversal of the trend in 2020 and 2021. 2022,
however, for the first time saw more than 30% of entrants making no run
QSOs at all, a situation that has continued ever since. In 2023, the number of
stations making fewer than 10% of their QSOs in a run exceeded 60%, a
situation that continued in 2024; there is no sign of a reversal in this
telling statistic. By 2025, that number was even higher, barely short of two-thirds. (I think that this is perhaps the most interesting statistic on this page, and I suggest that it speaks volumes about modern operators and stations.)
I
have not investigated the cause of the decrease in the
percentage of stations strongly favouring running, although the public
logs could readily be used to distinguish possibilities that spring to
mind, such as more SO2R operation, more multi-operator stations, and/or a
reluctance of stations to forego the perceived advantages of spots from
cluster networks. In any case, it certainly seems that SSB operators
seem to fall decisively into one of two camps: runners and callers (look
at the quite astonishing bimodal distribution in the first of the two
graphs above, with the vast majority nearly always calling other
stations).
On CW, the split between callers and runners continues to be much less
bimodal than on SSB (on SSB, nearly 40% of entrants have no
run QSOs; on CW, the equivalent number is below 10%, and shows no sign of rising appreciably). The
difference in call/run behaviour on the two modes (and the difference in
the way that the behaviour has changed over time) is profound, and
probably worthy of further investigation. CW continues to appear to exhibit
what would seem to be a much healthier split between the two operating
styles:
Assisted and Unassisted
We can see how the relative popularity of the assisted and unassisted categories has changed since they were introduced:
On
CW, there is now no longer more or less equal numbers of assisted and
unassisted
logs: a gap in favour of assisted operation has now definitely
established itself. On SSB the unassisted logs handily exceeds the
number of
assisted logs. My guess, for what it is worth, is that CW assistance is
more widespread partly because it (partially) absolves stations from
actually being able to copy at high speed, and partly because the RBN is
so effective that essentially all CQing stations are spotted.
I find it particularly interesting that the number of CWU logs has
remained essentially unchanged ever since the unassisted category was
created.
Looking at the number of QSOs appearing in the unassisted and assisted logs:
(The lines are for the median number of logs; the vertical bars run from 10% to 90%, 20% to 80%, 30% to 70%, 40% to 60%, with opacity increasing in that order.)
A long-term downward trend in the numbers of QSOs in the assisted logs
ceased in 2016, and since then the median number of QSOs in the
assisted logs has remained essentially unchanged. A more or less
constant difference of roughly one hundred QSOs between
the median CW and SSB logs (in favour of CW) continues.
Inter-Zone QSOs
We can show the number of inter-zone
QSOs, both band-by-band and in total. In these plots, the number of QSOs
is accumulated every ten minutes, so there are six points per hour.
Like other recent years, 2025 saw fairly ordinary 15m participation.
There was very little DX activity on 20m in 2025, on both modes.
As always, CW dominates on 40m; and, within that mode, intra-EU QSOs further dominate. After the first few hours of the contest, very little DX was worked in any of the last four years.
80m is always dominated by CW; 2025 showed a bit of improvement from 2024's record low level of activity.
160m paints a similar story to 80m, although the raw QSO counts are about half those on the higher band. Like 80m, 160m activity shows a slight improvement of 2024; but the DX activity continues to be well below that at the equivalent point of the last solar cycle.
The overall picture shows the progress of Cycle 25; but it now seems clear that DX activity is, for whatever reason, considerably less in this cycle.
