Yesterday was the 2009 North America CW QSO Party contest which I participated in. I used N1MM for logging and DM780 to interpret the incoming morse code and show it on the screen just like a RTTY signal. I’ll need to film a short clip of this in action and post it in case how it all works would be interesting to others.

I started on 20m and then I spent a little time on 10m and 15m making some contacts which provided additional multipliers more then a large number of contacts. My 10m contacts were to OK, FL (2), TX, Nova Scotia Canada, South Carolina  and Minnesota.

I got Montana as my 2nd contact in the contest, which is unusual since it is rather uncommon, and it took until late in the evening to get NJ and NY. Alaska was had on 20m in thr afternoon and I returned to 20m for a short time in the late evening to see if Hawaii was there and sure enough they were my first contact after going back to 20m to check. Maybe I’m getting the hang of this a bit? It was strange but I didn’t see a Nevada station the entire contest when I was on the air. I did log some of the normal ones that are uncommon for me like WY, ND, SD, NE and though I heard MD at least 2 different times, I think the op was having some issues because there were a lot of folks calling but he just kept calling CQ.  I also didn’t log CT, VT and RI. I logged a bunch of Canadian providences as well and 1 for Mexico.

As you start moving to different bands, repeats are minimized and things seem to move along a bit more consistent since the Op calling CQ has already heard/logged many of the stations so if, as an example, they catch just 2DSL they can safely assume it is me and already have my name/state so there’s no repeats there either. The noise on the bands wasn’t bad at all for me or at least while I was on I didn’t notice much of any noise. Today the weather is much worse here but yesterday was very nice.

I immediately uploaded to eQSL and LoTW and though the confirmations have come in, it isn’t close to the amount of RTTY QSLs you immediately get. I did notice on LoTW that I’ve already received QSLs for new bands with some states on CW, so that’s nice to see.

Here’s my log summary and thanks to all the ops that called CQ and let me make the contact!

        Band    QSOs     Pts  Sec   NA
         3.5      67      67   30    0
           7      69      69   30    0
          14     110     110   35    1
          21      14      14   10    0
          28       7       7    6    0
       Total     267     267  111    1

       Score : 29,904

73,
K2DSL