This past weekend was the CQ WPX RTTY contest and I put in a part time effort. It was a very long week at work and I was pretty tired Friday evening. I called it quits at 100 QSOs in the log even though there was plenty of evening operating hours left. It has been extremely cold here in NJ/NY and Friday through Sunday was going to be near record setting temps.
Saturday morning I stayed in bed late and did some other things before getting on the radio around 1pm ET / 1800z. I even had to help out the rotor a little to get it moving since it was so cold (near 0F/-17C) and hadn’t been used in a week. Once it started moving it was fine the rest of the contest.
Saturday was also Valentine’s Day and went out to a nice dinner with my wife. When I got back home I spent some time on 40m and 80m though there wasn’t a lot of activity on 80m as you can see from my score summary below. I didn’t stay up very late on Friday or Saturday when 80m probably had the most activity vs 40m. There was a bit of DX to Europe on 40m but most were North America based contacts. 15m was doing well with contacts being made to Japan. I even heard a South Korea station but there were too many west coast ops to break through. Ended up with 289 contacts in the log at the end of Saturday.
Sunday I spent more time in the contest. It was real cold out on Sunday with the morning temp being -3F/-19C with a wind chill of -20F/-29C. The morning had good conditions on 15m and 10m to EU and elsewhere and I spent most of my day on those bands with brief spurts on 20m. 10m is a pleasure since most contacts are 1 or 2 calls at most no matter where they are. I had contacts made with just 1 call to Guam, New Zealand and even to some JAs. I guess I recovered a bit of energy from the past work week as it wasn’t a big effort to stay longer at the radio. Late in the contest, JAs were coming in very strong on 15m like they were the previous day. Wrapped up the contest with 576 total Qs in the log which was more then I thought it would be based on how I felt Friday & Saturday.
Looking at the stats, out of 576 contacts I worked 74 different DXCCs and 445 unique stations. I didn’t work any stations on all 5 bands but 7 stations on 4 bands and 18 stations on 3 bands. I worked a total of 363 different call prefixes. Some of the more uncommon entities worked – Israel, Samoa, Qatar, Guam, Namibia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Logs were submitted to the contest robot, 3830, LoTW, eQSL, ClubLog, QRZ and Super Check Partial.
Here’s a map of the contacts made (click to enlarge) made with ADIF2MAP:
N1MM+ Score Summary:
Band QSOs Pts WPX 3.5 19 42 11 7 101 326 60 14 132 279 82 21 180 390 114 28 144 382 96 Total 576 1419 363 Score : 515,097
73 & Good DX!
K2DSL