This past weekend was the CQ WW RTTY ham radio contest. I was running 100w into my G5RV antenna and not using the cluster for spots. It started Friday night @ 8pm local time (0000z Saturday) but it wasn’t until 10:30pm that I could get on the air. I spent about 90 mins making contacts on 40m & 80m and called it a night with 50 Q’s in the log.

Saturday I was able to spend most of the day participating. I started out on 20m and checked 15m from time to time. 15m wasn’t great but it was better then in recent contests so there were mults available to work. I even managed to get three 10m contacts including one to Galapagos Islands. I imagine if more folks were on 10m we could have seen more activity there. I flip-flopped between 20m and 15m working stations S&P style. With high power stations, finding and maintaining a run frequency in the 20m band was rough. At least with filters, adjacent stations can be blocked out, but with so many stations, they sometimes overlapped. I’m sure there are tricks to knocking out 1 station overlapping another but it is quicker to move on and come back. Saturday afternoon the EU stations were coming in nice and strong. I didn’t see any JA stations but they are usually not strong and in S&P without the cluster I might just pass right over them.  In the early evening on Saturday switching to 40m turned up some more stations including some strong EU’s. At 8pm local, 0000z I needed to head to a party for 5 hours. Once I got back around 1am I got back on for 90 mins and worked 40m & 80m stations. I ended up heading to bed Saturday night with about 360 Q’s.

Sunday morning I woke up and for a short time got on the air to and logged about 25 contacts on 20m and 5 on 15m before I needed to shut things down and head to a NY Giants football game. It was a real bad game and it then took about 1 hour extra to get home, so I wasn’t on for almost 8 hours on Sunday during the prime DX time. Once I got home I scanned through 15m and logged a few before switching to 20m and again S&Ping for a bit. I decided to call CQ on 20m and found a spot though it only produced 15 US stations in 15 mins. I switched to 40m for 30 mins and worked mainly US and Canadian stations before switching to 80m with 30 mins left in the contest. I did some quick and productive S&Ping on 80m, again working mostly US & Canadian stations. With 20 mins left I picked an 80m frequency and called CQ. I worked 27 stations in 20 mins, again mostly US & Canadian station, but there were 2 stations from the Ukraine at the very end that I could put in the logs. it was a productive run to wrap things up and I ended up with 491 Q’s.

Here’s a map view of the contacts made over the weekend (click to enlarge):

Here’s the score summary:

  Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty   ZN  Sec
   3.5      68     88    7    6   21
     7     108    169   24   10   34
    14     248    504   53   18   36
    21      64    135   27   15   10
    28       3      7    3    3    1
 Total     491    903  114   52  102

 Score : 242,004

I had a real good time in the contest. I made less contacts in 2010 then in 2009 but I also spent less time operating this year, including a large chunk of time on Sunday. I wish I had better antennas to hear all the stations that seem to hear me better then I hear them. Some day… I can dream.

73 & Good DX!
K2DSL