I didn’t get started until noon (ET) / 1600z on Saturday as I had plans on Friday night and went to help a local ham lower his tower on Saturday morning. When I got on the air, the bands were hopping and it wasn’t hard to stay busy.

I configured N1MM to enable Spot all S&P calls since everyone can run assisted and use the DX cluster. That means any call I log that wasn’t already in the bandmap gets spotted. Not sure if there’s something online that tells me how many spots I sent to the cluster (DXWatch seems to max out at showing 50) but I’d say there were a lot. Even near the end of the contest I had a few ops that sent me a message as we worked on another band thanking me for the spots.

I had the NA4RR hexbeam pointed at Europe until late in the afternoon and turned it around to point to the NW to start having the JAs come in, which they did. The JAs were mostly on 15m as usual but I started to hear them on 10m. Once some were spotted, more showed up and I worked 11 JAs in a row on 10m and 15 JAs worked on 10m in the span of 1 hour.

Later in the day on Saturday I saw a spot for N2YBB who is Mike L the ARRL Hudson Division Director operating in the NY QSO Party that was going on so I worked him. I ended up working a total of 39 NY stations on 40m and 80m SSB whenever I wanted to take a short break from hearing diddle.

Once it was good and dark, I worked stations on 40m and 80m until I headed off to bed with 341 Qs after Satuday’s effort.

Sunday morning I got up, got on (7:30am ET / 1130z) and the bands were still as good as they were on Saturday. Was able to work TA7I in Turkey on 10m (new band already confirmed via LoTW) as well as 15m. I also worked KG4HF in Guantanamo Bay on a 5th band in the contest. KG4HF happened to be the only station I worked on all 5 bands. I previously worked KG4HF last weekend on 17m.

My club was having their fall foxhunt and I was going to participate, but the bands were too good and I was having too much fun so I just drove over and gave someone the club’s debit card to pay for pizza after the event. There was a good turnout at the foxhunt but I don’t have info on it yet. So I headed back home after a short break and got back into the contest. I spent the rest of the contest bouncing around between the bands and calling CQ at times with some success. The higher bands were good enough that even near the end of the contest there seemed to be more activity on 20 than on 40m and certainly than on 80m.

Some other notables worked in the contest – Turkey (TA7I) on 10m & 15m & TA1BM on 15m, 2 different United Arab Emirates stations on 15m, Guam (KH2F) on 15m, New Zealand (ZL1BYZ) on 10m & 15m and South Africa (ZS6A) on 10m.

I wrapped up with 663 Qs in the log over the course of about 21.5 hours according to N1MM with a break being > 30 mins. Looking back over http://3830scores.com , this would be the highest QSO/Points I’ve logged for this particular contest with over 100k points greater than last year, but I missed most of Sunday last year. I worked 58 different DXCCs with the US being the most logged followed by Japan with 42 contacts.

This contest uses Age as the exchange, so excluding 00’s for the ladies and 99’s for clubs and eliminating multiple contacts with the same operator, the average age of what was sent was 59.2 years and the median was 60. The youngest age was 27 and the oldest age was 84. The age most logged was 64.

Here’s a map of the contacts using ADIF2MAP (click to enlarge):

Here’s the N1MM score summary:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  DXCC  Areas
  3.5      34      68    3    8
    7      84     176    9   14
   14     156     396   36   15
   21     245     650   44   21
   28     144     414   39   13
Total     663    1704  131   71

Score : 344,208

Thanks for all the contacts & 73,
K2DSL