I haven’t been on the radio in a while due to many other family activities going on this month so it was great to fire things up and everything was working well. Downloaded the latest N1MM version and configured the macros for the SP DX ham radio contest and I was ready to start making contacts.

The weather outside was pouring rain and it was cooler than it should be this time of year. I’m not sure when spring will finally arrive here and it will start to get consistently warmer and sunny out, but Saturday wasn’t a nice day.

Got on 20m and spun around and worked a SP station for #1 and a few North America stations followed by a booming JM1XCW station. I checked 15m often and there just wasn’t activity there or I wasn’t hearing much.   There wasn’t a tremendous amount of activity on the bands so I took a bunch of breaks and came back to the radio after a while to work new stations. I repeated this often throughout the day. I worked a few SP stations but I thought I would hear a lot more from Poland than I ended up with.

Later in the day as the sun started to set I went over to 40m and spent some time there working stations, mostly in North America. Called CQ for a while and did pretty well on 40m. Check 80m but didn’t hear anyone (well 1 station) and I ended up shutting things down a little early and watching TV with the family so I didn’t spend any time on 80m to log more NA stations.

It was great to get on the air again if I didn’t rack up a large number of contacts. It is always fun. Here’s the score summary from a few hours on the air:

 Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty  Sec  Cnt
  3.5       1       2    1    0    0
    7      50     177   10    2    0
   14      81     517   26    5    4
   21      14      72    8    0    1
Total     146     768   45    7    5

Score : 199,680

73 & good DX,
K2DSL

I’m a little late getting to posting about this past weekends CQ WPX SSB ham radio contest. There was a lot of anticipation that the conditions were improving and that activity would be high and it seems like that was indeed the case. The contest started Friday night and ended Sunday night. Single Ops could operate 36 of the 48 hours but that wasn’t an issue for me as I wasn’t able to operate in a true full-time effort, especially on Fri & Sat evenings.

For those that don’t work the WPX contests, anyone can work anyone else, and the prefix of the call sign is the multiplier so a K2 & W2 are 2 different multipliers. Multipliers are counted once across all bands and not once per band. Also there are more points for contacts made outside your own entity so Canada contacts are more points than US contacts and contacts on a different continent are worth even more.

Friday:

Fri night I operated around 3 hours and started on 15m where there was already activity not just Fri night but all weekend long. I was able to log a Hawaii station right away. After 15 mins I  moved to 20m and worked S&P through the band. I worked S&P the entire weekend and never called CQ once. 20m was already wall to wall with loud and often times overlapping signals. I spent most of my evening there and moved to 40m and 80m for a short time to get anyone I could hear before calling it a night with around 80 contacts in total.

Saturday:

Saturday’s time on the radio was again all S&P and started around 11am local time 1500z after some errands and a much needed haircut. Most of the first part of the day concentrating on 15m and 10m. 10m seemed to have some activity throughout the daylight hours and 15m was more like 20m has been with wall to wall signals throughout the day with a bit less chaos than 20m. 15m had a lot of the typical South America stations booming in but there were also plenty of EU stations and even Africa stations coming in. I spent a lot of time tuning the dial on 10m looking for new stations to log. Again, the South America stations were coming in strong as they do whenever I’m hearing 10m stations. The Caribbean stations were all loud as well. You can see from the 10m map below that the SA stations I made contact with were primarily on the coasts. I also had no problem logging a contact with a ZS station in South Africa on 10m at a distance of 8000 miles. This was my 2nd South Africa 10m contact since being on HF.

I did pop over to 20m on Saturday to spin the knob up and down to log stations, but I did head back to 15m and 10m and spent more time there. I was more interested in logging new countries on 15m and 10m than just increasing my total number of contacts for the contest. As the sun started to set I again spent some time on 40m and 80 thought 20m was active up until I got off the radio that night. I ended Sat night with 332 contacts in the log. Compared to 2010 CQ WPX SSB contest where I finished with 671 Q’s I figured I was lucky if I’d even approach 500 on Sunday.

Sunday:

The rest of Sunday was spent scanning up and down 20, 15 & 10 though I spent much more time on 10m. Yes it was much less productive but I wasn’t going for large numbers. When the contest came to an end I was pleasantly surprised I had logged 563 stations with more contacts on 10m than on 40m or 80m. I ended up working 81 DXCC entities which is 10 more than last year with 110 or so less total contacts. I also worked 26 different CQ zones, not that that those are a factor in this contest either. I worked 7 different stations on 4 bands but none on 5 which isn’t surprising since I spent very little time on 80m. 17 other stations were worked on 3 bands.  It was a very enjoyable weekend so thanks to all for hearing my 100w.

Here are maps of the contacts made. The first map shows all contacts and the second map shows the 10m contacts made. Click on the images to open a larger view:

Here’s the score summary for the weekend:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  WPX
  3.5      34    103   27
    7      65    176   33
   14     202    482  127
   21     186    470  115
   28      76    190   40
Total     563   1421  342
Score : 485,982

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend I was busy and mostly out of the house on Friday night, all day Saturday, Saturday night and all day Sunday. That meant no time on the radio for the 2011 ARRL DX SSB ham radio contest. I did check Facebook and saw some other emails indicating conditions were good, specifically on 15m and 10m, but I wasn’t able to get on the air.

On Sunday we had our local ham radio club’s annual auction and I was there from 10am through 5pm. I guess I could have tried to sneak in a little time before 10am on Sunday morning but I had some other items to deal with. While I was at the auction I checked my phone a few times and saw some posts about decent conditions so I know some folks were probably having a lot of fun. After the auction ended and in the pouring rain and wind, I got home and for about 1 hour I got on the radio and worked stations on 15m and 20m. I checked 10m but it was late with the sun already set and I didn’t hear any signals. In a quick hour I made 40 contacts with nothing exotic. I did hear a JA station on 15 but he faded quickly and I wasn’t going to hang around and see if conditions improved. P40A on 20m who was running 5 watts and booming in as if he was running 1KW.

I hope everyone that did spend time in the contest had a lot of fun. Here’s my short contest summary:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty
   14      22     66   15
   21      18     54   10
Total      40    120   25

Score : 3,000

K2DSL

Saturday was the 2011 NAQP RTTY Sprint Winter run of this fun ham radio contest. It’s a 12 hour ham radio contest where single ops can operate for 10 hours total (30 hour min breaks if taken).  it started out 1pm local time here in NJ and I got onto 20m to start right at 1pm. The exchange is name and state (if not DX). I did a lot of S&Ping in the beginning and then bounced to 15m where I hit up stations I could hear there. After checking 15m about 45 mins into the contest I popped to 10m just for the heck of it and was able to work 2 Arizona stations that were coming in loud and clear – W6LL & W7WW. I checked 10m once more later in the day but didn’t hear any one else and I didn’t call CQ.

In the late afternoon I called CQ on 20m for a while working some DX stations (points but no multipliers) and had a couple of Alaska stations call me which is always great. I even had a Japan station send me their call but I had too much trouble pulling it in. I think the JA station was JH2FXK. Oh well, thanks for trying!!

I took a 30 min break to go and pick my two daughters up from returning from a week trip to Europe. They went with kids from their school and the bus bringing them home from the airport brought them all right into town. They had a fabulous trip and want to move to Barcelona. Because I took that 30 min break, I operated until 11:30pm local time, 10.5 hours after I started the contest.

I then started to focus on 40m popping back to 20m to see if anyone new came along that was calling CQ. Each time I’d find a few new stations and then switch back to 40m and then eventually 80m. The bands seemed to be in good shape and copying stations on any of the bands was not particularly difficult. As the day went along, working a station on another band is primarily just making sure you have the call correct as the exchange is the same (Name & State) so even a rougher copy is not a big deal and repeats aren’t usually necessary.

I ended up working all US states except Vermont and Hawaii. I didn’t run into any HI stations on 20m or 15m which are the likely bands for me and I didn’t hear any VT stations on 40m or 80m which is the likely band I’d work them on. So it was a close WAS-in-10-hours but not a complete one. I worked 1 WV and 1 MS station which always seem to be the troublesome ones for me to find in a US contest. SC is also sometimes a tough one for me but I worked 2 different SC stations in this NAQP as well as multiple RI and DE stations.

As I approached last years Feb NAQP QSO count of 344, I had fewer multipliers, so my score was lower for the same number of Qs. It took a bunch more Q’s this year to surpass the 43,344 score from last year. The 77 additional Q’s in 2011 vs 2010 put my claimed score at 54,730 so it’s a good improvement in points and Q’s over last year.

I had a quick dinner break and spent most of the evening on 40m and 80m alternating between CQing and S&Ping when CQing slowed down. I was able to hold a frequency for as long as I wanted so having the other stations at 100w, even with much better antennas then my wire ones, helps in that regard.

Even when I finished up there were still stations active so either they were operating the full 12 hours or folks took more breaks or started later then the beginning of the contest. I didn’t hang around on the air much longer to see when activity seemed to really drop off.

I did notice 1 operator with a mis-typed name sending GEROGE instead of GEORGE. This situation occurred last fall in the same contest with TOM vs T0M (letter vs number zero) and depending on how (and if) George submits his log, there might be some folks that have GEORGE and some that have GEROGE. Hopefully the contest folks, as they did with TOM vs T0M, can handle this in their log checking.

Here’s my score summary. Thanks for all the contacts!!

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec   NA
  3.5     122    122   39    0
    7     107    107   39    3
   14     171    171   34    2
   21      19     19   10    2
   28       2      2    1    0
Total     421    421  123    7

Score : 54,730

73,
K2DSL

I wasn’t able to spend a lot of time on the radio this weekend in the ARRL DX CW contest, but for the time I was on it was a lot of fun. Compared to the 2010 ARRL DX CW contest, I made a lot fewer contacts but that is because I was on the air much less.

I didn’t spend any time on 80m as I wasn’t around the radio at the times when 80m was worth tuning up so all my contacts are between 40m and 10m. Last year there at this time and for this contest the atmospheric conditions peaked and the same occurred this year. I hope the conditions remain favorable as it is the first time since I’ve been licensed that the conditions have been this good.

My score summary shows there wasn’t a lot of activity, but in the short time, I was able to log 39 contacts on 10m with the highlight being a 8000 mile 10m contact with ZS6RJ in South Africa. That is my longest 10m contact so far. Below is a map of all contacts followed by a map of just the 10m contacts.

Conditions during the day were fairly good though I felt 20m and 15m still had a fair amount of noise on them. I worked more contacts in the early to mid morning east coast time as that was when I was able to spend time on the radio. Sunday late in the day near the end of the contest, 40m was terrific with very little noise an strong signals coming from Europe. In the last 45 or so mins of the contest I was able to work about 30 contacts on 40m without any trouble including 4U1ITU that I worked for the first time.

Kudos to AY9F who sent his power as 5 watts. Great signal! I like the stations that send NN (99) as their power vs 100 or ATT. Maybe that will catch on for future contests. I worked 5 stations on the 4 bands I operated and 16 more on 3 bands. Of the 266 contacts made there were 190 unique stations logged. It looks like 72 different DXCCs worked with Brazil leading the way with 20 Qs followed by Italy with 13 and Germany with 12. I worked 18 different zones across all the bands and 8 different zones on 10m.

Map of all contacts in the 2011 ARRL DX CW contest (click for larger view):

Map of 10m contacts in the 2011 ARRL DX CW contest (click for larger view):

Map of 40m contacts in the 2011 ARRL DX CW contest (click for larger view):

Here’s the score summary for the weekend:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty
    7      55    165   33
   14     118    354   59
   21      54    162   34
   28      39    117   25
Total     266    798  151

Score : 120,498

73 & good Dx!
K2DSL