I’ve been extremely busy at work and had family events the past couple of weekends so I’ve not spent much time on the radio. This weekend I was able to put in a few hours on Sat & Sun afternoons and worked a bit of the WAE CW ham radi ocontest as well as some Rookie Roundup SSB contacts.
Saturday I got on the radio late in the morning and early in the afternoon and made a bunch of 20m CW contacts with stations in Europe. The WAE contests also have a operation called QTCs where you can send a batch of 10 previous contacts you’ve worked to the operator for additional points, but I’m not comfortable enough with CW to do it in this mode. I have done it in the RTTY version of this contest. I checked 15m once or twice but didn’t hear much so I stayed on 20m. By the time 40m would be active I was done for the day and had other things to do in the evening. On Sunday I had our local ham clubs annual picnic to go to so I was busy with that until mid afternoon. Once I was home I made some more contacts with European stations and though the weather outside was a bit rainy, the signals towards EU seemed pretty stong. I ended up with a total of 81 contacts in 27 different DXCCs.
Here’s my score summary:
Band Q/QTC QSOs Pts Cty 14 QSO 81 81 54 Total All 81 81 54 Score : 4,374
Sunday afternoon was also the ARRL Rookie Roundup SSB contest and I ended up working 12 different ops in 10 different states. What qualifies as a rookie in this contest is someone licensed in 2008, 2009 or 2010 so I just miss out. Each of the rookies I worked in the contest was extremely courteous and pretty efficient. They seemed comfortable on the air and knew the exchange well. I guess I expected a bit more stumbling but if they were nervous it didn’t come across over the air. It’s always good to hear that you gave one of them a new multiplier from the rare state of NJ! Nice job to all the ops!!
I also made 1 lone MD QSO Party contact on 80m.
Next weekend is the opening [pre-season] game for the NY Giants in their new stadium so I’ll be there for that on Sunday. It’s also the SARTG RTTY contest as well as the NJ QSO Party. For the past 2 years I’ve been away on vacation that week and missed one of the SARTG sessions as well as being out of state for the NJ QSO Party. With the Giants game being that weekend, it looks like I’ll now be missing air time for that.
73,
K2DSL – David