This weekend had 3 ham radio contests I was going to try and participate in – SARTG RTTY, NAQP SSB & the RTTY Rookie Roundup. SARTG consists of 3 sessions each lasting 8 hours with one starting Fri evening, one Sat afternoon and one Sun morning. Fri night we had tremendous thunderstorms pass through so no operating on Fri evening for session 1.
Saturday I got on at noon local time and started to make contacts. 20m & 15m were active so I flopped back and forth between the 2 bands. 10m was dead with no activity that I could hear. On the 1st 2 hours I worked 47 stations and then flipped to the NAQP SSB contest to make some contacts as it just started. After 2 hours making SSB contacts I popped back to the SARTG RTTY and made another quick 9 contacts on 20m before I needed to head out to a charity event. After I got back home, the bands were still active and in just over 1 hour before the 2nd session ended I was able to make another 39 contacts on 20m, 15m and a handful on 40m. Nothing exotic logged but a fair amount of activity which netted me 96 contacts for the session. The NAQP SSB was still active so when this session ended I switched over to SSB and finished the evening out with that contest.
The final 8 hour session started 4am local time and I had no burning desire to wake up any earlier than I normally would. I actually ended up sleeping longer than normal (or going back to sleep after I woke up when my alarm would normally go off) and I got back on the air at 8:30am local time. I sometimes have good luck in the morning and today ended up to be a pretty good morning too. After a brief scan of 15m and 20m I picked a frequency on 20m and started calling CQ. The 4th op to come back to me was a strong JA station followed immediately by 2 other JA stations. I never had 3 JA stations call me before in any contest, let alone 3 calls in a row. Those 3 JAs were 3 different call areas so 3 different mults as an added bonus. After a couple of more contacts the auto-repeat on my CQ was going and going so I switched back to S&P and noticed a station that I had a good copy on sending DV1/JO7KMB which is a station in the Philippines and an entity I haven’t yet worked. The station wasn’t spotted yet and no one else was sending their call except me. He knew someone was there but he couldn’t get a copy on me. He tried hard, but my 100w into a wire dipole wasn’t enough. I then spotted him on the cluster and went to wake my daughter up to wish her a happy 16th birthday.
After my daughter opened her birthday cards and presents, about 45 mins had passed and I got back on the radio. The same Philippine station was still there but there were a couple of other stations calling so I didn’t bother. I tuned around the band and the first station I came across was another DV1 station calling CQ and no one sending their call back. This time it was DV1JM and I had a good copy on him so I sent out my call. He heard someone there, as the other DV1 station did, but after a couple more attempts he had my call and then I send the report a few times and I was in his log! Woohoo! After that 1 contact I took another 30 min break and hung out with my daughter before she was going out for the day. I spent about another 90 mins in the contest making a few more contacts on 20m and 15m and called it a day (until the Rookie RoundUp). I ended the contest with 135 Q’s in the log and a big smile on my face.
I checked LoTW and it looks like DV1JM (Jun) is an active LoTW user so hopefully I’ll have a new one confirmed shortly. In checking the rules, it shows a Single Op Single Transmitter category but I don’t see how to specify it in the cabrillo file so I posted to the RTTY reflector and pretty quickly received a reply from the SARTG contest manager that they will update the page. Once that is done I’ll send my log in.
Here’s a map of the ham radio contacts made in this contest (click to enlarge):
Here’s my N1MM score summary:
Band QSOs Pts Are DXC
7 10 60 3 3
14 82 880 30 12
21 42 470 22 6
Total 134 1410 55 21
Score : 107,16073,
K2DSL