Many different challenges await the avid radio amateur.
In beginning our planning for 1998 we had spent a good deal of time thinking about what had caused us to miss the sweep in prior years. We seemed to be having trouble just getting our signal heard over all of the other contest band activity. We always tried to work 24 hours straight-through, so that we would finish at 2100Z on Sunday. Even in attempting QSOs with stations located in less-rare sections we could often find ourselves waiting in line to work the contact. As a result, our QSO rate was suffering and we were hanging ourselves up when we could otherwise be moving up the dial getting more QSOs in the log.