The most important event of the year is always the Stew Perry Contest, on the last week-end of December, and organized by the Boring Amateur Radio Club http://www.jzap.com:80/k7rat/stew.html .

The Stew Perry Topband Distance Challenge has established itself as the “friendly” 160 meter contest.  While it enjoys strong activity, the band is slightly less crowded than the major 160 meter contests.  This provides more opportunities for the “non super stations” to make intercontinental QSOs. 

I’m not a contester any more, but I participated every year since 1997 with the same working conditions and the following results, which well indicate the solar cycle behaviour. There are no multipliers and the score is given by the sum of the “distances” of every QSO.

The last two editions of the contest should had shown an “eleven years” recurrence with the beautiful DX conditions we enjoyed in 1997: a great opening with California and all the West Coast from midnight to our sunrise! With those low numbers of the solar minimum we strongly hoped they should have repeat… there were good conditions with Japan, but all the NA signals were weak and not yet any station heard from West Coast. That’s a pity, because the band was wide open until a few days before…with same solar and geomagnetic numbers, and we had again a great opening with the West Coast a couple of days later! See this page.

But just as opposite, most of the East and North European stations have been enjoying great conditions during this event: it seems they are much more favoured by the current deep solar minimum and the absence of aurora and are taking advantage on the high latitude paths better than us.