I had a lot of non-contesting activities this weekend so I had a very part time effort in this years Makrothen RTTY contest. It is a 24 hour contest broken up into three 8 hour sessions over the course of the weekend. I put in a couple hours on Fri night and a few hours on Saturday in the late afternoon / early evening after my local clubs hamfest all morning and a high school football game in the afternoon. I was able to get on the air for just 1 hour on Sunday morning before heading out to the NY Giants football game.

What is neat about this contest is the points for each contact are based on distance as calculated between my grid square and the other operators grid square which is part of the exchange. In addition, contacts on 40m are worth a 50% bonus and contacts on 80m are worth a 100% bonus. It’s also why the scores are so high in this contest.

For the most part I operated S&P but I went into Run mode a couple times and was surprised to have many DX stations call me including South Africa which was my longest contact in the contest at over 8100 miles. I also had an Alaska station call me and then spot me which gave me a nice run of station after station for a few minutes.  I also had a contact with a station in Panama. I don’t have Panama confirmed for DXCC yet so I sent a QSL card off to the US based QSL manager for the station and I hope to get a reply to have that one confirmed.

Below is my score summary:

Band    QSOs    Pts
 3.5      15   35610
 7        38  147108
 14      129  531984
 Total   182  714702

 Score : 714,702

QSL cards have already been written for new contacts made and ready to be sent out via the bureau.

73,
K2DSL