I was able to pop into the WAE CW contest over the weekend for a few hours each day. This contest allows a US station to only make contact with an European station to exchange a serial number. A twist in this contest is it also allows exchanging QTCs which is where we’d send a list of 10 contacts made – their time, call and serial number received from the other station. Each QTC equates to a “contact” from a points perspective so if you work 100 stations and make 100 actual QSOs, you can double the number of points by also sending 10 batches of 10 QSOs to 10 different stations you work. I’m not comfortable enough with CW to do QTCs so I declined. For CW, we’d send the info so it wouldn’t be that difficult so maybe next year I’ll consider sending CW QTCs. I have no issue with QTCs during the RTTY version of the contest where we can send and receive those with EU stations.
Friday night about 1 hour after the contest started I got on and made 24 contacts all on 20m in just over 30 mins. I had family in from out of town so I spent time with them vs being on the radio. I checked 15m but there were no stations heard.
Saturday morning I started out on 20m but there was little activity and I moved to 15m where I made most of the contacts until early afternoon when 15m seemed to fade and all activity was on 20m. Somewhere on Sat I got pulled along to a pet store to check out new kittens to adopt so there was some furry things in the house as our previously adopted cat of 14 yrs had recently passed away. I wrapped up my radio time for the day around 3:30pm ET (1930z) and headed off with the entire family to a pre-season NY Giants football game. My daughters both leave for college starting this week so it was nice all of us got out together. Finished up on Saturday with 104 Q’s with EU stations logged in N1MM.
Sunday morning I got on and made some contacts again on 15m before moving to 20m. My local radio club family picnic was today so I drove over to the park where it was being held. We had about 50 people there when I took a quick headcount. It looked like there was enough food for 200 people so no one was going to leave hungry. After a couple hours I headed back home to make a few more contacts and help around the house as my girls are getting ready to leave. I was surprised at the end end to see I was able to make an additional 101 contacts on Sunday for a total of 205 Qs with EU stations.
There were a few times during the contest that I followed or might have been followed by K2DSW, an operator in Iowa. With our calls being so similar it was interesting to hear the delay, or not, between various operators when I sent my call just after they logged a contact with K2DSW. Some times I’d hear a pause and sometimes the EU operator wouldn’t miss a beat. I contacted K2DSW after the contest and we had a great exchange which I’ll follow-up on in another post soon.
Below is the summary from N1MM and it shows that 20m was a better band for me over the weekend for the times I was able to be on the air. If I had sent QTCs, I would have doubled the number of points though the multipliers would have been the same so my score essentially would have doubled.
Band Q/QTC QSOs Mult 14 QSO 142 68 21 QSO 63 40 Total All 205 108 Score : 22,140
I heard a bunch of non-EU stations on CW while I was in the contest, but since we can only work EU stations, there was no reason to call them. I heard at least two different stations in Turkey that were loud as well as familiar calls for some familiar and always loud stations int the middle east.
73,
K2DSL