This past weekend was a big RTTY contest and for the most part I was able to operate whenever I wanted. Last years version of this contest had excellent conditions and resulted in the most contacts made in any contest to date. This years results came in a close 2nd – surpassing the score from last years CQ WW but coming short a couple dozen Qs. I ran unassisted so any station I worked was found by spinning the knob or when calling CQ.

Friday:
Fri night I spent just 3 hrs on the air and ended up logging 112 Qs on 20m, 40m and 80m.

Saturday:
After waking up Sat morning I scanned through 80m and 40m logging anyone on those bands before popping up to 15m. There were stations being heard from 21.065 thru 21.150. It took quite some time to take one pass thru the band working any station I could hear. I then checked 10m and was estatic to see the band already open to Europe. The 10m band stayed open the entire weekend as it did last year. I needed to tighten down the RTTY filter on my Kenwood TS-2000 at points with so many stations so close to each other. It was great!

Before this weekend I had worked a station in Guam just once since I’ve been on HF. This weekend I worked 3 Guam stations all on 10m! It is so much more enjoyable to work 10m when it is open then to fight the higher noise level on 20m or even 15m.

We went out to dinner with my brother in law for a couple hours Sat evening but I got back on the air after for a couple more hours to log some states/entities on 40m and 80m. I spent most of Saturday doing S&P just because I seemed to achieve a higher rate then when I tried to call CQ. I ended up Saturday night with 583 Qs and 459k points. A good day on the radio!

Sunday:
Sunday is usually slower just from working so many stations on Sat, but it wasn’t much slower this weekend. Maybe I needed to work a little harder then just spinning the dial 500hz to work the next station, but there was plenty of new stations or stations on a different band to make Sunday fun too. 10m and 15m were the most productive but I spent time on 20m to get more multipliers. The bands were still good and 10m and 15m were wall to wall taking up a large portion of each band. I kept expecting to stop hearing stations as I tuned up the band but they just kept coming through.

Sunday @ 6:44pm ET / 2244z I surpassed last years score with 53 less Qs as a result of more mults or more DX Qs vs North America Qs. Late on Sun I was able to work some JAs on 10m though some of those took a few repeats.

I was hoping to match the Qs logged from last year but I came up a bit short with 25 less Qs. My score though was 897,600 which is 39,432 greater then 2011. I’m very happy with how the weekend turned out.

I uploaded my logs to LoTW, eQSL and sent in to the contest. I already have Guam now confirmed on RTTY for a new mode and Bolivia confirmed as a new DXCC.

Stats:
Some interesting stats show I worked 44 of the 48 mainland states, most on multiple bands. I logged 679 unique callsigns in 82 unique DXCCs within 2 days.  On 10m alone I worked 57 unique DXCC entities. I worked 30 of the 40 CQ zones. I worked 3 stations on 5 bands, 18 stations on 4 bands, 40 stations on 3 bands  & 111 stations on 2 bands. 33% of my Qs were with US stations.

Here’s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs   Pts   ZN  DXCC   ST
  3.5      41    49    4     3   19
    7     119    177   8    19   35
   14     228    507  24    60   41
   21     316    772  23    66   27
   28     232    607  21    57   18
Total     936   2112  80   205  140

Score : 897,600

Here’s a map of contacts made over the weekend using ADIF2MAP (click image for a larger picture):

Thanks for all the fun!
K2DSL