This past weekend was the ARRL CW Sweepstakes where you try to work as many US/Canadian stations as you can. I was able to put in close to 13 hours over the course of the weekend and ended up with 314 contacts.
There are 80 sections across the US and Canada and I logged a contact in 76 of them missing just MS in the US and NL, NWT and SK in Canada. I heard a NWT station in a big pile up but moved on and didn’t hear them again. I heard a SK station late Sunday after returning to the radio but he faded right after I tuned to him.
What I did for this contest is just start at the low end of each band and tune up, stopping for any station I heard. I wasn’t connected to the DX packet cluster but each station I heard shows up on my band cluster. If I notice a gap, I go back and see if I just missed a station or there is really no one there. After I get to the top of the band, I look back and hit any stations I could log or if there was any open spaces on the band I might have missed one. I then either switched bands or started at the bottom again.
I used N1MM for logging and DM780 (part of Ham Radio Deluxe) to decode the CW signal. The combination worked extremely well. Last night after the contest ended I was able to quickly export the N1MM file and import it and process it into Ham Radio Deluxe. A US/Canadian contest like this is easier since almost all are in QRZ with valid contact info and grid locator info. Since I don’t normally send QSL cards out to US and Canadian stations, there isn’t much to do after this one ended.
I was happy with my performance and still expect to spend some time learning CW so I don’t have to rely on a program like DM780, though seeing it all in print is certainly helpful. It let’s me capture the transmission while entering the exchange into N1MM and sending my exchange simultaneously. Hopefully some day it will all become second nature and it seems is the case for many others.
I stayed on 20m, 40m and 80m and didn’t even tune to 15m because there’s no band multipliers nor can you work the same station on multiple bands. A fellow club member sent me his score summary and he had s bunch on 15m. Maybe I should have tuned around and checked it out at least once during the day on Sunday.
I worked KL7AF from Alaska again on Sunday after hearing him on Sat with a large pile up. I worked 3 or 4 Hawaii stations on the 1st or 2nd that were all loud and able to hear me without issue. I’ll have to see if I get a few LoTW confirmations for different bands for some states. I noticed one already for Maryland on 20m CW which was confirmed after I uploaded my log last night. I also worked Randy K5ZD for the first time on CW. Randy is the CQ WPX Contest Director who I have also had some email conversations with, even earlier in the weekend for entering in paper logs for others and some possible programming to help things out for his contests.
Here’s my score summary for this weekends activity:
Band QSOs Pts Sec
3.5 104 208 26
7 90 180 15
14 120 240 35
Total 314 628 76
Score : 47,728Thanks for the contacts and 73,
K2DSL