This weekend I put in a very part time effort in the EPC WW DX PSK125 contest. I operated high power for up to 12 hours though I operated much less. I found PSK125 to be a rough go. It is extremely fast in transmitting but I fely the ability to get through a solid transmission was much worse then say RTTY. Ops were sending  CQ many times in a row so you could notice them since it sends so fast and then sending the report multiple times (3 times per line and 3 lines per report) since the copy seemed to be so poor. I also didn’t notice a large number of contest participants so after operating for a bit on went on to other things and popped back in every once in a while to see if there was anyone new to try and contact. I ended up with 25 contacts on 20m, 14 contacts on 40m and 9 contacts on 80m. Total multipliers was 26 across the 3 bands for a final score of 3.120 points.

In non-contest activities, I’ve had a bunch of US contacts related to the LoTW triple play award. Even though I don’t yet do CW, I’d like to get all 50 states on digital and phone and maybe before the end of the year I’ll be CW-ing and can concentrate on that. The past few days, besides the contest and the US contacts, I made 10 DX contacts including another contact with Victoria (VP8YLG) this time on 20m, DR09ANT special event station in Germany, 9A2009OS special event station in Croatia, Bosnia on 80m, a strong station in Austria and a new DXCC logged with J79WWW in Dominica.

In the afternoon on Sunday, I was tuning through a 20m frequency when I heard someone asking if the frequency was in use. I stayed on the frequency and when he called CQ I came back to him. The operator was ND0C (Randy) from Minnesota and he was running 3 watts (!!) in a QRP contest. I was amazed as he was blasting in as if he was on a local repeater. I spotted him on the cluster (wrong freq the first time but then I corrected it) and stayed on frequency a while to listen. Fantastic job Randy!

73,
K2DSL