This past weekend was the WAE RTTY contest. Since Daylight Savings Time ended here, 0000z is 1 hour earlier. The contest started at 7pm ET Friday night and ended 7pm ET Sunday evening. I was able to spend a good amount of waking time working the contest. I didn’t stay up later then I would have to put in extra hours. I’ll need to check what N1MM reports but I think I put in maybe 4 hours Friday and then 12-14 each day on Saturday and Sunday.

This was the first time I used QTCs and it was interesting. QTCs are more about the score and not about the contacts so I didn’t push hard asking to send/receive them. I asked a few times and whenever someone asked me, as long as I was getting a good copy on them, I took them. Probably easier to send then receive, but I’m sure I’m a weaker signal to them then they are to me. But next time, I’ll push QTCs more.

My summary looks like 420 contacts in total with 173,888 points. Remember last nights quick analysis, it consisted of 50 DXCC entities, 3 of which are the US, Alaska and Hawaii. I like the ability to make US contacts and not just international ones. Makes for more action for us little guys. I think there were 2 new DXCCs out of those 50 which were Greenland and Gabon in Africa. In a quick review once I imported the log and ran it against QRZ, it looks like I made contacts in 41 of the 50 states.

A lot of the contacts were ones I made previously. If I knock those out and all the US/Canada QSOs, there’s less then 75 new contacts in my log. I’ll go through this week and see which I might send a paper QSL card to. LOTW and eQSL were already updated. LOTW now shows me with 2,821 records uploaded and it’s jumped to over 1,007 confirmed QSLs, which should rise further over the next week as folks submit their logs to LOTW. The RTTY contesters are the best at sending to LOTW. I looked and I’m not showing any new DXCCs confirmed in LOTW yet so it is still showing 65. Maybe some of the contacts in DXCCs that previously didn’t upload their logs will do so, so even though I only contacted 2 new DXCCs, there could be contacts with ops in DXCCs that I previously contacted but don’t have confirmed yet on LOTW.

So tonight when I get home from work I’ll mess around with the data and run some reports against the data to see how things are shaking out. RTTY is so much fun!!

73,
K2DSL