This weekend was a 24 hour RTTY contest that ended up being fun and I think I did well. It’s always nice to hear the diddles in your ear as you tune up a RTTY contact.
The contest started Sat morning at 1100z and lasted for 24 hours. I started working it a bit after the contest started and most of the morning through the afternoon. Took some breaks, ran some errands, went outside to enjoy the gorgeous day and blew off fireworks for a couple hours since it is July 4th here. I didn’t stay up overnight, or even late, but woke up and made 3 or 4 contacts in the morning after I woke up and before the contest ended.
The DX really picked up in the afternoon as expected and that was the vast majority of the long distance contacts. That is until I got on late in the evening after the fireworks and before heading to bed. I made more local contacts in 40m and decided to call CQ on 20m at 0345z. To my surprise, ZM2B is the first station to come back to me. I asked AGN? because I was shocked. Yup, ZM2B in New Zealand! I exchanged reports, made 2 more US contacts before the next call comes in as VK7AD. I thought maybe it was K7AD so I again said AGN? and it comes back VK7AD again. Holy cow – an Australian station coming back to me calling CQ. We exchanged reports, had another US station come back and then a KH6 station from Hawaii. In the span of just a few minutes of calling CQ I logged New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii on my 100w and G5RV wire antenna!
I think this contest favors, on the scoring side, the west coast US states over the east coast states as the multipliers are the call areas in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia. Japan and Australia are more difficult for the east coast states. What else would have helped my score is more contacts/multipliers on 15m. 15m seems very weak on my G5RV and I never do well on that band. In this contest, the 3 contacts I made were all in the 4 call area so only 1 multiplier there. If I spent time getting more mults on 15m and on 80m the score would have gone higher.I just wasn’t on the radio for the prime 80m time which might have helped.
I did have a good number of longer distance 40m contacts to Europe and had fun both S&P’ing and calling CQ, A fun 1 day contest.
Band QSOs Pts Cty Sec 3.5 5 35 2 4 7 59 450 11 13 14 172 1590 34 14 21 3 15 1 1 Total 239 2090 48 32
Score : 167,200
73,
K2DSL