Not a contest you can win from Western Belgium, especially not on 40m Single Band. It is impossible to compete against eastern Europe and Russia, as those station have a much much easier path to Oceania, than we in western Europe. On the other hand it is a nice DX-contest, to test equipment. The communication path is towards the other side of the world (down under...) as we have to reach only stations who belong to he Oceania area. 
Unfortunately there are not so many stations active in that area, so usually the contest goes very slow and you nust keep patient.
Also in our local evening there is another Phone contest (European Sprint), which makes the band incredible busy with a lot of interference of very strong European stations, which can be a mess. So it is also very much of good reception of the weak pacific stations...
Everything went fine - in the evening the contest went that slow, that there was time to work several other interesting DX, such as Laos (XW1A) and Uganda (5X4A) - a pitty, that Peter confirmed via E-mail that just in the middle of our conversation, they got a power failure in Uganda... rather regular situation there...

Result (claimed), Single band 40m, single operator: 40 qso's - 16 wpx prefixes = 3120 total score

CQWW is always one of the top contests of the year. Competition is very severe, as most of ham radio operators try to win this contest. Also technically speaking it is a very difficult event, as RTTY modulation requires a continious carrier to be transmitted. This means, that the equipment must be able to deliver the continious peak power as a continious carrier - one have to keep that in mind, when running amplifiers.
Some year ago, I had to realise that my antenna switching relays were not able to cope with the very high RF current present at my low impedance antenne feedpoints - the relais simply melt away...
Fortunately everything went smoothly and I worked just everything I could hear - the 4square antenne worked great and I could break almost all pile-ups with the first 3 calls at least.

It seems, that I am certainly in the top10 of the world - according the known claimed scores of the competitors I could achieve 5th place worldwide

Result (claimed): 1077 QSO's - 41 USA/Canada states - 101 countries - 29 CQ-zones = 436221 total score

The YO DX contest 2008 was the first contest I tried with the refurbished 4ele vertical array. The antenna performed great and clearly the average 2000km path from Western Belgium to Romania is not too far for communications with rather high S/N ratios.
The average Romanian station could be heard with S7 signals and 10-15dB S/N. Using an amplifier of 1kW output at my side results in a steady S9 signal in Romania - enough for constant attraction on my frequency and good run-rates during the contest.
I obviously spend too much time on CW - just the last 30min of my evening operation I switched to phone. During the these last 30min a constant pile-up of stations occured which gave me a lot of extra points, which I did not expect. 3 station/min ratie was possible for rather a long time..

I closed the operation in the evening at about 22h local time (20h UTC) as the contest was just a test of the new antenna and equipment...

Here is my (claimed) result:   290 QSO's, 66 multi's for a total score of 65934 points