Without too many time consuming obligations this past weekend I could participate a fair amount in the BARTG HF RTTY contest. I had high hopes, but in a nutshell, conditions seemed to stink. Bands were poor for me with weak to no signals on 15m and 10m. Not sure why, but seems it wasn’t just me with post contest reports talking about lousy band conditions. But, we make do with what we have and like most things in life, any time on the radio is better than time at work – at least for folks where every day isn’t Saturday.
Friday night my local club the Bergen Amateur Radio Assoc (BARA) had a VE testing session. We had 19 individuals, 17 of which walked out with a new license or upgrade including 4 new Extras. 8 of those were brand new hams, some of which walked away with their General class license. I was home before the contest started so I had time to setup N1MM with the appropriate macros for an exchange that includes RST (599), serial number and the current time in UTC. It’s a bit of a long exchange and I’d like to see 599 removed, but we all have to send the same thing.
Friday evening after the VE test session I got on the air for a bit. I made some 40m/20m contacts for a short time but things were kind of quiet. Checked 80m but heard no signals at all before turning off the radio. Ended Fri night with just 39 contacts and was hopeful I’d hear more signals the following day.
Saturday didn’t prove to be better than Friday night. I wasn’t hearing many European stations and signals were weak when I heard anyone. 20m had the majority of the activity and 15m was quiet with 10m dead. It was taking me back over a year to before the current sunspot cycle started and you spent all your time on 20m. But even 20m wasn’t great. I checked 15m and 10m often but there just wasn’t a lot of activity. I did catch a New Zealand station which was loud on 10m and he seemed to be loud for a while. Otherwise, 10m was useless the entire weekend with just 12 total Qs. It was well after dark before 40m activity picked up and it was ok, though mostly US stations. I even worked a few 80m stations, but there wasn’t a real lot of activity there either. Ended up with just 205 Qs in the log at the end of Saturday.
Sunday conditions certainly didn’t start out better. 15m and 10m were again pretty unproductive with most activity on 20m. I worked 2 stations on Sunday that I had worked on Saturday and I’d consider them dups. What was odd was their serial number which is part of the exchange was lower on Sunday than on Saturday. I’d have to guess maybe they had a computer/logging issue and had to start over. I worked the contest on and off throughout the day/evening taking breaks and running errands. I did a bit more CQing on Sunday on 20m and 40m. Had some luck, especially when I was spotted by some ops which helped. I usually spot stations myself if they aren’t already on the band map, assuming I’m using the cluster. It’s always nice when I’m using the cluster to see someone else spot me. I closed the contest out on 40m though I checked 80m and didn’t hear anything Sunday evening.
In the end, I finished up with 377 contacts with a few dups on top of that. I did work all 6 continents with just 37 DXCCs including the US and Canada. There were 272 distinct calls logged and only 3 calls worked on 4 bands with no calls worked on all 5 bands.
Here”s the score summary from N1MM:
Band QSOs Pts DX Areas Con
3.5 14 14 2 7 0
7 105 105 14 17 3
14 194 194 29 17 1
21 52 52 13 11 2
28 12 12 6 6 0
Total 377 377 64 58 6
Score : 275,964Here’s a map generated from http://levinecentral.com/adif2map (click to enlarge):
Thanks to everyone for the contacts!
K2DSL