WQ6X Wanders Experimentally Thru a minor Radiosport WeeKend

The 1st three weekends in June bring us a handful of short radiosport contest GiGs, representing
a myriad of different contest objectives.  The end of June we of course have the myriad Stew
Perry 160 GiG, the WV QSO Party, the All Asian DX Contest and Field Day FD radiosport events. 
The GiGs prior to those events not only enable us to play radiosport contests, almost more importantly it offers the opportunity to thoroughly test remote connections, as well as equipment configurations on BOTH ends.

Similar to the weekend before this weekend a trio of events (2-domestic, 1-worldwide)
were offered, which I purposely ran mostly on Cw (saving my voice amongst other things). 
This weekend brought us:

• [X] - The TIZA CUP (worldwide) GiG
• [X] - The Kentucky QSO Party (KYQP)
• [X] - The Atlantic Canadian QSO Party (ACQP)

Putting it bluntly, BOTH QSO Parties were a HUGE disappointment.
The TIZA GiG not only was a disappointment, [for whatever reason] score
submission for this event is not available on the 3830 Scores website - wassup with that?

Those of us outside the target area spend hours wandering seemingly aimlessly through the bands looking for what turns out to be only a dozen stations in the entire 12-hours.  While contest promoters may claim there were dozens of stations on the air, my Question is: WHERE ARE THE BANDMAP SPOTS???  From a recent internet exchange, others said that they saw all kinds of bandmap sports, suggesting that I am using the "wrong" callsign server, or, that the settings I use with the TELNET window are limiting the "vision" of what's out there.

Several months ago, when I called-out a poorly participated QSO Party, one of the promoters
chided me that the reason I couldn't hear many stations is because I am in California and running QRP.   He went on to suggest I should by an AMP and/or move closer to the east coast.  What does the amount of power I am running have to do with a dearth of participating stations in the host state?
They certainly were not in the band map.

Overall, for the QSO parties, while I made barely a handful of Ssb contacts, I used the voice keyer memories built-in to the remote K3.  Making Ssb contact was easy because the exchange was simple
"5 - 9 - California" in both GiGs.  In fact, the microphone wasn't even plugged in - those memories had been pre-recorded WEEKS ago.  While I ran QRP for the QSO parties, during the TIZA Cup contest, propagation was so poor the power was upped to over 90-watts, which of course, didn't bring in any more stations on the other end.

Sunday evening, after checking into the usual bevy of west coast 75-meter traffic nets (WPSS
on 3.952, Golden Bear on 3.975, WARFA on 3.908 and the Western Country Cousins on 3.970),
I switched remote access to WA6TQT's STN-1 to run 160-meter directional-determination tests. 
At the last minute, it made sense to write-up the experiment as a separate Blog. 
[CLICK HERE] to read the results of that investigation when I finally finish that Blog.

XYZZY