Saturday morning through Sunday morning was the RSGB IOTA (Islands On The Air) ham radio contest. I figured I’d pop in from time to time throughout Saturday to make a contact here and there and that’s how things ended up. Saturday was extremely hot out with the temperatures in the upper 90’s and approaching 100F.

I got on the air a couple of hours after the contest had begun and made a few 20m SSB contacts before checking 20m CW but I didn’t hear much activity there so I flipped back to SSB. I checked 15m from time to time but it was dead quiet again for me like it was during the NAQP RTTY contest. Since I was on the radio during daylight hours only there wasn’t much 40m activity either though I did log a couple of Q’s there. Late in the afternoon, the EU stations started coming in louder then the US stations and they were easier to log later in the day.

My wife and I had plans to go to dinner with a bunch of folks so before dusk we left for dinner. When we got back late in the evening about 5 hours later, I put the radio on and worked 3 stations (2 IOTA + 1 non-IOTA) before working Hawaii and Australia (Tazmania) to end things before shutting down. Always nice to end with a nice contact to Australia at a bit of 10k miles from my location.

Almost half the contacts I made were with IOTA stations worth 15 points each vs the non-IOTA stations worth 3 points each. Not that I was shooting for any big score, but you can see how big a difference there is. Logs have been uploaded to eQSL, LoTW and sent in to the contest. There is an interesting 2 step confirmation process to submitting your logs for this contest where you need to go online, add some additional information and confirm your submission.

Here’s a screenshot of the contacts made which you can click to enlarge:

Here’s the score summary:

  Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Sec
     7  LSB      2     18    1
    14  CW       6     42    2
    14  USB     58    486   24
 Total  Both    66    546   27

 Score : 14,742

73 & stay cool,
K2DSL