Just finished up the 2010 SCC RTTY ham radio contest. It’s a 24 hour contest that runs from 8am (1200z) Saturday to 8am (1200z) Sunday morning. I got started a little late on Saturday and the conditions didn’t seem too good. DX was a bit hard to come by and many of the contacts were local (US) stations. At least US stations outside of the 2 call area are worth 2 points. I checked 15m a couple of times and it was again dead to me. I made just 2 contacts on 15m which is disappointing.
After logging a station on 15m and then going to log the same station again on 20m, N1MM crashed. I went over to the N1MM Group and saw that I wasn’t the only one. In true N1MM fashion, K3CT was working on a fix and had posted a patch. I misunderstood the instructions but K3CT set things straight and N1MM then worked perfectly.
In the late morning things picked up a bit and the DX started coming in. I even worked TA2ZF in Turkey again. Folks on the RTTY reflector were commenting on the poor conditions and AC0C noted that for him, logging me in NJ was DX for him based on the conditions. By mid afternoon things were going along well but I was set to head out for a few hours with the family so off I went. I got back in the early evening and things were still ok on 20m with the 40m activity picking up and doing well. I thought I was done for the night but I needed to pick up my daughter from a friends late in the evening, so I popped back on and made some contacts on 80m finishing with a quick scan of 20m netting me ZL3TE/1 in New Zealand before heading off to bed.
I woke up Sunday morning with a little time before the end of the contest. EU stations were weak and I had already worked the strong stations so I waited a bit and signals picked up enough to log 9 more before things ended. In the 2008 SCC RTTY contest I made slightly more contacts then I did this year while in 2009 I only made a handful. Reading the log from 2008 I seemed to have spent much more time operating then I did this time around. I also hadn’t switched to using N1MM and MMTTY yet.
Here’s the 2010 SCC RTTY score summary:
Band QSOs Pts Sec 3.5 14 26 13 7 55 115 34 14 117 269 56 21 2 4 2 Total 188 414 105 Score : 43,470
Contacts have been uploaded to HRDLog.net, LoTW, eQSL and now QRZ.com’s logbook as well. I’ll have to see which ops I want to send paper QSL cards to. The cabrillo log file has also been submitted for the contest.
73 & good DX,
K2DSL