After watching a movie on TV I turned on the radio and noticed the DXpedition team in Guyana South America was active on 40m and I could hear them fine. The operator was calling by the numbers and had just moved to 3’s so I had a bit of a wait. I looked at some spots and noticed a strong Brazil station PR7DZ coming in also on 40m and that was an easy contact.I also listed on 80m CW where 8R1PY was spotted but I wasn’t hearing anything.

I went back and listened on 7.140 to 8R1PY. He was listening up 10 on 7.150. I switched to listen on 7.150 and the other operators who’s number didn’t match what 8R1PY was requesting kept putting out there call. Why, I have no idea. After each contact the 8R1PY op said what number call area, yet the other ops didn’t listen.Don’t they realize that they are just prolonging the amount of time it will take the 8R1PY op to get the call for a station they keep QRMing? The 8R1PY op could handle 2x or 3x the number of contacts of the ops just listened.

When he came back around to 2’s, I put my call out, and listened after each time to see if he was coming back to me or another op. If I didn’t hear anything, I did it again. He picked up a couple of PY2’s and some XE2’s and then he came back with K2? I put out my call twice and he said K2D? I then put my call out a few more times and he came back with K2DSL! I gave him a good 59 and thanked him. QRZ doesn’t have a maidenhead grid square locator listed so using http://www.levinecentral.com/ham/grid_square.php?Address=Lethem,Guyana I get a grid square of GJ03ci which should be pretty close.

I have 2 other Guyana contacts logged but neither are confirmed yet. I’ll decide if I want to send this one out direct to PY2WAS who is listed as their QSL manager or if I’ll send the QSL card out via the bureau. I am confident though that I’ll get a QSL back on this contact to confirm Guyana as a new DXCC.

73,
K2DSL

I made a RTTY contact with E21YDP in last weekends JARTS RTTY contest. I checked after the contest and it appeared that Dej hadn’t ever uploaded any contacts to LoTW so I sent him a QSL card direct and a couple green stamps for return postage. I looked tonight after making some CQ WW SSB contacts and he must have uploaded his logs as it shows Thailand  confirmed  in LoTW for a new DXCC for me. A good start to the weekend!

73,
K2DSL

Saturday night, in a lull during the JARTS RTTY contest, i made a dozen contacts in the NY QSO Party. 10 contacts were on SSB/phone and 2 were on RTTY. Nothing fabulous here but it gave me something to do while I waited for some other stations to show up in the RTTY contest.

As I made contacts, if I didn’t see the station already listed in the cluster, I spotted the station.  I noticed an announcement show up a short while later on the cluster and it said:

WQ3X - K2DSL tks WB2KLD spot. Was one of my 1st QSOs back in 1964!

Russell, WQ3X, was a young teenager back in 1964 according to his profile on QRZ and had the callsign WN2QJI. Tom, WB2KLD was also a teenager. I hope they had a good reunion.

73,
K2DSL

With the 183 contacts logged in this past weekends Makrothen RTTY contest I have over 10,000 contacts logged. Ham Radio Deluxe is showing 10,093 contacts covering 151 different DXCC entities with 4,493 distinct stations. My first logged HF contact is on June 15, 2008 so it took just under 16 months to hit 10,000 contacts, many of which were made during contests.

LoTW shows 5,028 confirmed QSLs and eQSL shows 2,610 confirmed. Ham Radio Deluxe shows 297 paper QSL cards received.

Thank you to all those almost 4,500 operators that have made this hobby so much fun. Here’s to the next 10,000 !

73,
K2DSL

As mentioned at Paraguay – New DXCC Logged, today I received a QSL card confirming the contact. Boy was that quick, but what is even more impressive was K2DER’s communication. Hugo is ZP8VAO’s QSL Manager and when he received my QSL card and SASE, he contacted me via email AND posted on my blog. That’s what I call an attentive QSL Manager. Many thanks to Hugo, K2DER and of course to ZP8VAO for the contact with a new one for me.

73,
K2DSL

As I was playing around in the WAE SSB contest I flipped to 15m to see if there was anything going on and the only station I heard was ZP8VAO and he wasn’t in the contest. So I launched Ham Radio Deluxe’s logbook to enter in the call and saw it came up as Paraguay and a new DXCC. I put out my call and he came right back and made the contact. He checked to make sure he had my call correct since I wasn’t already in his logbook and I confirmed it was our first contact.

After logging the call I looked at the QSL info and it’s a local US QSL Manager so the QSL card and SASE is already written out and ready to get dropped off at the Post Office. Thanks for a new one!

73,
K2DSL

Received a direct QSL card from T77NM in San Marino today to give me another confirmed entity. The 20m contact was made back in May during the Volta RTTY contest.  It is still the only contact I have with a station in that entity so it’s nice to have it confirmed.

73,
K2DSL

I posted about the Hiram Percy Maxim 140th Birthday Celebration Special Event that the ARRL is running for a week from Sept 2nd through 9th. It took place over the Labor Day weekend and thought there were many family obligations (food & drink), I was able to operate a bit.

I ended up making a total of 139 contacts as K2DSL/140. Out of the 139 contacts, 66 contacts were with other /140 stations. 3 contacts were with Canadian station and 1 with a station from Mexico. The remaining stations were US stations that covered 34 different states, including MT, ND, ID and 4 to Wyoming.

It was a lot of fun and glad I participated. I have my /140 LoTW certificate so I’ll be uploading these to LoTW. I also have a few eQSL contacts sent to my K2DSL account that I’ll confirm as well.

73,
K2DSL

I had made 4 contacts with J5UAP in the entity of Guinea-Bissau on the west coast of Africa back in March of 2009 on 20m RTTY and USB. I see that Peter must have uploaded his log to LoTW and I now have them all confirmed.

Thanks for another new one Peter!

73,
K2DSL

Came home from work and there was a thick envelope from the NJDXA which contained 46 cards. 1 of the cards was for a different call sign so I’ll hand it to someone in my club that handles the QSL cards to get it re-routed. But the other 45 were all for me. Of the 45 QSL cards received, 19 cards were from operators I hadn’t sent a QSL card to yet so I filled out 19 new cards.

The most cards were 11 from Italy with others from Germany, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Columbia, Belgium, Finland, Canada, Mexico, Cyprus, Scotland, Poland, Bulgaria, Switzerland and Norway.  Quite the collection of nice looking QSL cards.

Sure beats getting bills in the mail.

73,
K2DSL