Friday night into Saturday I operated the TARA RTTY Melee contest. It’s a 24 hour contest that you can operate a max of 16 hours. I started on Friday evening and operated for about 4 hours making 103 contacts on 40m and 80m and primarily US/Canadian stations. I got back on the next morning after 8.5 hours off so I could operate as much as I wanted on Saturday.

Saturday I spent most of the day on 20m. I checked 15m a few times but never heard any stations. Even on 20m I was making contact primarily with US/Canadian stations. In total there were 24 different countries outside of mainland US and Canada I had a contact with so really not too much DX. We started to get snow flurries mid morning and it turned to large wet snow flakes which came down for the remainder of the day.

I left during the day for a couple hours to go and meet Gordon West which was fun. Other then the break for a couple hours I tried to be on the radio as much as I could. As the day/contest wore on, it was more difficult to find new stations that were in run mode, and when I went into Run mode the contacts were sporadic with extended periods of the macro calling CQ and repeating. Some 15m and 10m activity would have helped and maybe the 160m contest had some folks operating there instead.

I ended up with 260 contact which is 61 contacts better then my score in this for 2008. All contacts have been uploaded to LoTW, eQSL, HRDLog.net and ClubLog and the log file sent in. There were a few paper QSL cards to  fill out for this and I did those this morning along with finishing up some lingering from last weekends CQ WW CW contest.  I’ve already seen a lot of eQSL and LoTW QSLs for this contest already on the respective sites.

Here’s my score summary:

Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty
 3.5      82     82   20
   7      61     61   26
  14     117    117   27
Total    260    260   73

Score : 18,980

See you in the log,
K2DSL