This weekend was a 1 day IOTA (Islands On The Air) contest. It lasted from 8am (1200 UTC) Sat morning through 8am Sun morning. I made a total of 43 contacts all on 20m, many outside of the US including the Ukraine, Canada, Belgium, Madeira Islands off Portugal, Scotland, Germany, France, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Columbia, Bahamas and a couple to Hawaii. I looked on 40 and 80 and there was no one there that I could hear.

As the bands were opening to Europe around 7pm ET (2300 UTC) I had to leave to go to a party with my wife. Crummy timing! When we got home around midnight, I made a few easy contacts before heading off to bed as the band was empty and only a few were calling CQ. I woke up in the morning around 7am ET with 1 hour left in the contest but 20m was quiet and I didn’t find anyone on 40 or 80.

A fun contest and it was nice to get some new countries in my log.  I used N1MM for logging in the contest and when I was done, imported them into Ham Radio Deluxe. I’m also testing out a utility by WD5EAE which is working well in automating tasks when importing into HRD and automating the processing of logs into ARRL’s Logbook Of The World (LOTW).

73, K2DSL