This weekend at work I had a major platform launch so other then 4 quick contacts I made Sat morning, I didn’t operate until Sunday.

Sunday morning I worked from home and made contacts in between calls that were wrapping things up. I am glad I did as I was able to log a contact with YB0PAH in Indonesia for a new DXCC. Now I just need for it confirmed. I was able to really start operating after things were wrapped up with work after noon local time.

I was stuck inside the past few days and it has been beautiful out so I also took a walk for a while and enjoyed the nice weather. I took a much needed 2 hour nap after a few 18 hour days in a row dealing with work. But, it was great to get on the radio and make some RTTY contacts! Most of the time I was on 20m hopping to 15m from time to time but there wasn’t a lot of activity I could hear and work. I checked 10m twice but didn’t hear anything there.

About 40 mins after making my first contact with a station in Indonesia, I heard a ZL3 station on Tokelau Islands which would have been another new one, but I wasn’t able to make a contact before I couldn’t hear the station any longer. I did make a nice contact with New Zealand and it is always good to log at least 1 Japan station in any contest. I also logged 2 South Africa stations, one of which is a special event station for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, so I will be sending for a QSL card for that contact.

I ended up with 248 contacts but more importantly ham radio contesting is a great way to end a hectic but successful week of work. Here is the score summary:

Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty  Sec  Cnt
 3.5      20      20    2    9    0
   7      61      61    6   14    1
  14     146     146   40   14    4
  21      21      21   11    5    1
Total    248     248   59   42    6

Score : 150,288

73 and happy diddles,
K2DSL

We had a tremendous storm come through this weekend starting on Friday. We had very high winds of 50+ mph and non-stop heavy rain starting Friday and continuing into Sunday. The NA RTTY Sprint started at 0000z (7:00 pm) Saturday evening. I got on about 10 mins late because of the weather and I made 8 contacts before the power went out. The power stayed off for 13 hours 0000z to 1300z which is 7:20 pm local time to 9:15 am local time with the 1 hour Daylight Savings time change thrown in.

There are folks in my town still without power. There were large trees down throughout the area, massive flooding and property damage. For me, luckily no damage and the G5RV stayed up and weathered the storm fine.

Next weekend I have a large project launch for work so operating in the CP WPX SSB contest will be minimal. If things go well with the launch, maybe Sunday will allow for some operating, when do things ever go well with a large launch?

73 and stay dry,
K2DSL

This weekend I had a bunch of prior commitments so operating in the contest was limited. Fri night I went out to dinner with my younger daughter while me wife and older daughter were at a friends Sweet 16. After a late dinner I got on 40m and 80m and made 36 contacts before calling it quits.

Saturday morning I operated for a couple hours before being gone from noon to 9:30pm local time – prime 15m & 20m time.  I started out Saturday morning making 2 contacts to Hawaii on 80m which I hadn’t done before. I also had 2 on 40m shortly after. I left on Saturday with 118 contacts. When I got back that evening I again made some more on 40m and 80m before calling it a night.

Sunday morning I got on again for a couple hours before heading out to my radio clubs annual auction. When I returned home I got back on 15m and 20m before moving to 40m and 80m as the sun set.

Bands were active but not like the. ARRL DX CW contest. Only one 10m contact for me which was D4C in Cape Verde but maybe I missed more openings when I was away from the radio. 20m was a zoo where almost any frequency I tuned to I could hear 3 stations. I attribute that to a combination of a wire antenna receiving from all directions, the SSB filters on the TS-2000 and crowded bands. 15m was more spread out so it was usually just a single signal I would hear on any frequency.

Comparing my contacts with last year I made about the same number this year with less operating time and more multipliers to give me a bit higher score. Others from my local club operated as I either heard them on the air, spoke with them at the auction, or they emailed me. Seems to be the most club members I can recall operating a contest which is good.

March is a busy month on the weekends with family commitments and also a big system release at work the end of the month so as I predicted in describing my total contacts for last month an just breaking the 2000 mark, this month will likely be much less.

Band    QSOs   Pts  Cty
3.5      28     84   23
  7      35    105   31
 14      91    273   55
 21      61    183   30
 28       1      3    1
Total     216  648  140

Score : 90,720

73 & good DX!
K2DSL

On Saturday I participated in the NA RTTY QSO Party and hadn’t planned to do much operating on Sunday. I had a couple of computers dropped off by friends to work on to clean up some viruses that they had. Well while running through cleaning them up, I often have to wait while things run. I got on the air and heard some NC stations so I started to log them. In the end I ended up with 76 contacts during a part time effort.

I was surprised to see that NC has 100 counties. That is a pretty large number of counties. I ended up logging a contact in 46 of the 100 counties in no short part due to the very impressive efforts of a couple of mobile stations including AA4XX, N4C, N5WR & NY4N. Those stations put some serious miles on their vehicles during the contest.

Here’s my score summary:

Band   Mode  QSOs   Pts  Sec
 3.5   CW      23    60   11
 3.5   LSB     17    21    6
   7   CW      26    68   20
   7   LSB     10    10    9
Total  Both    76   159   46

Score : 7,314

73,
K2DSL

Saturday was the 2010 North America RTTY QSO Party (NAQP). A single operator can be active for 10 of the 12 hours the contest runs. Operators are also limited to 100w which is all I have anyway.

The night before was a warm up and I had decided to try and use the ESM function in N1MM. That means N1MM sends certain macros based on what info is entered and where the cursor is when you press the Enter key. Prior I would press specific function keys based on what I wanted to send. It took some getting used to but trying it out in the warm up the night before was worthwhile. I also tried to use the call stacking option which if in Run mode and you notice multiple stations you can stack them vs calling CQ after each exchange. That was less intuitive and seemed to be hit or miss so I don’t think I have what I need to do worked out well.  During the contest I did pretty well with the ESM feature and pressing enter. Once in a while I’d press enter and the wrong message from what I expected was sent, but that was because of the info entered or where I had the cursor. It’s just something I’ll stick with and should get more obvious as time goes on.

I was able to get on the air at the start of the contest and spend about 6.5 hours of the 10 hours working stations on 15m and 20m before moving to 40m after dark. 15m seemed to have some activity but nothing compared to the last 2 weekend contests. I don’t know if the conditions have changed or if folks just weren’t on 15m. I was able to log my first Alaska contact on 15m. When I needed to head out to dinner with my wife and friends I had 247 contacts in the log. Dinner took longer then planned and I was gone for over 2.5 hours. Dinner was good though!

After returning from dinner I ran through 40m to get any stations I hadn’t logged and then went to 80m. I then got a call from my older daughter asking me to pick her and her friends up in about 1 hour. I continued to work stations and do some CQing on 80m until I needed to head out and get my daughter and friends. It took 40 mins to pick them up and drop them all off. It left me with 1 hour of time before the contest was going to end so I finished scanning 80m and then picked a frequency and just went into run mode until about 10 mins left before seeing if there was anyone to work on 40 or 80m.

I worked for a few non North America DX stations but not too many. They all called me when I was CQing. What I did notice that was a little frustrating were stations that were calling CQ but didn’t end with a CQ or QRZ. As I was tuning up/down the band, if I hit one of those stations there was no way to tell if they were calling CQ or if they were sending their call sign to the station calling CQ. As an example (using a fictitious call sign) they would call CQ NAQP de K2XXX K2XXX . If I was tuning to the frequency I’d see something like de K2XXX K2XXX and not know if I should put my call out or not. So then I’d wait a bit and find out they were really calling CQ and I didn’t need to wait.

RTTY contesting is fun and I ended up with the following:

Band    QSOs   Pts  Sec   NA
3.5      82     82   38    0
  7      95     95   36    3
 14     146    146   32    1
 21      21     21   14    2
Total   344    344  120    6

Score : 43,344

See you in the next contest,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the 2010 ARRL International DX CW Contest. DX stations can only contact US/Canadian stations and US/Canadian stations can only contact DX stations including Hawaii & Alaska.

The most noteworthy item is that the conditions allowed me to make 10m DX contacts.  I made 20 contacts on 10m to 11 DXCC entities which were: Argentina: 3, Aruba: 4, Barbados: 1, Neth Antilles: 1, Colombia: 1, Grenada: 3, Hawaii: 3, Martinique: 1, Nicaragua: 1, St Vincent: 1, Virgin Islands: 1.  Prior to this weekends contest, in total I had 37 contacts on 10m so this weekends contacts represent more then 50% of the total 10m contacts prior to this contest, most of which were US contacts. Along with 10m having relatively a lot of activity, 15m was again a busy band like it was the previous weekend for the CQ WPX RTTY contest.

Fri night after getting home from work I got things set up and spent a little time making contacts. I ended up with 53 contacts on Friday all on 40m before calling it a night. Saturday morning I got back on the air on 20m and signals were so strong from Europe that I often had to turn the pre-amp off and adjust the RF gain to hear the signals well as they were coming in so loud. Mid morning I switched to 15m and it was doing well again. I needed to run out to get a much needed haircut so I left with 73 Q’s on 20m and 50 Q’s on 15m after about 3 hours of operating.

After returning Saturday from getting my haircut and having lunch and getting back on, I had about 200 Q’s at 2:00pm local time. Around 2:30pm local 19:30z I checked out 10m and was amazed I could hear DX stations and they could hear me! I spent about 30 mins tuning and making contacts on 10m. I then switched to 15m and made a contact with the TX4T DXpedition in French Polynesia. I also made a contact with them later on 20m. I checked their web site and I show they already have me in their log for the 2 contacts. After dark on Sat before on made a couple of contacts on 20m with Japan. They weren’t strong for me but I think they were good exchanges. I ended Saturday on 40m and 80m with a total of 337 Q’s and 182k points.

Sunday morning just after 9am / 14:09z I worked J38XX giving me, for the first time, the same station logged on 5 bands 10/15/20/40/80 meters. Not long after I grabbed a fresh cup of coffee and when I sat back down a station was calling CQ on the last frequency I was on. It was a TA2 station from Turkey. I put out my call and he came back to me and I was able to log Turkey again. A pileup then started to build. I see today that my contact with TA2ZAF was confirmed on LoTW already for a new DXCC confirmed.

A couple hours later I was able to log Tanzania for the first time and it was on 15m. I also logged a ZS1 South Africa station on 15m. Not long after I was able to log Hawaii on 10m and logged a total of 3 Hawaii stations on 10m. I then stopped just making any contacts and started to look for 10m and 15m stations for DXCCs I didn’t already have and worked those. Between that and the fact I worked a lot of strong stations on Saturday, Sunday’s # of contacts was down. Early in the evening I logged Japan on 15m for the first time. I switched to 40m and 80m and worked what I could before dinner and the end of the contest.

I ended up with 2 new DXCCs logged getting Tanzania and French Polynesia in the logbook. I ended up working 2 stations on all 5 bands and 16 additional stations on 4 bands. There were 491 contacts with 334 different stations. Those 334 stations covered 76 different DXCCs. Not bad at all for 100w & G5RV!

Here’s my score summary from N1MM:

 Band   QSOs    Pts  Cty
 3.5      43    129   28
   7     105    315   48
  14     200    600   65
  21     122    366   53
  28      20     60   11
Total    490   1470  205

Score : 301,350

73 & Good DX,

K2DSL

Following up with some additional info on my CQ WPX RTTY Contest Summary I have noted the following:

A) 340 contacts made during the contest have so far been confirmed via LoTW which is almost 40% confirmed in less then 1 week. More will trickle in and I would expect a total rate in the 50% range.

B) There were 9 call signs that I worked on 4 bands. 3 of those 9 were outside of the US. I worked 32 call signs on 3 bands of which 11 were outside of the US.

C) US stations accounted for 53% of all contacts followed by Canada at 4.7%, Germany at 4.3%, Spain at 2.9% and Italy at 2.6%.

D) Out of the 436 different WPX prefixes, the US led with 176 (40%), Germany with 26, Ukraine with 17, Canada with 17 and Spain with 13.

Here’s a map of the contacts made in the contest. I loaded the records into Ham Radio Deluxe and exported the records into a Google Earth KML file. I don’t have Google Earth installed on this computer so I then loaded the KML file to one of my web sites and in Google Maps I referenced the KML file via a URL and it generates the map.

73 & good DX,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the 2010 CQ WPX RTTY contest and boy did I have fun! I got home from work a little late and got on the air about 1.5 hours after the contest started Fri evening but that isn’t a problem since a single op can operate 30 of the 48 hours. I ended up able to put in 30 hours in total without missing any sleep.

Friday night before heading off I was able to make 118 contacts on 40m & 80m. When I got back on Saturday morning around 1240z (7:40am local time) 20m was good to EU. It was easy to tune up the dial and work most stations on the 1st or 2nd call, even with 100w and my G5RV.  At 1450z (9:50am local time) I switched over to 15m and wow! I had never been on 15m when I could hear and work this many stations – come on sunspots! I stayed on 15m until 1630z (11:30am local) and ended up making 45 contacts. That might not seem like a lot but I think that might be close to or more 15m contacts then I made in another other contest in total. I went back to 20m and made more contacts flipping to 15m from time to time. I ended up with 68 contacts on 15m on Saturday. By 5:00pm local time (2200z) I had worked 20 of the 40 CQ zones.

Saturday later in the afternoon I picked a 20m frequency and was able to hold it and run for about 50 mins and making 45 contacts. They were all mostly US stations with a couple DX and Canadian stations. I then switched to 15m to see if I could hear anyone new and the 1st station I heard was a ZL1 in New Zealand and I was able to work him. I moved to 40m and 80m at 2300z (6:00pm local) for a couple hours before heading to dinner. When I left for dinner I was about up to the total number of contacts I made during the entire WPX RTTY contest last year. When I came back from dinner Saturday evening  a couple hours later I got on 40m and 80m again. I had a good 80m run for just under 1 hour even having some DX stations call me. I called it quits for the night at 0545z (12:45am local). On the first day I ended up logging 575 contacts over the course of about 18.5 hours.

I had 11.5 hours or so of operating time left in the 30 hours we can be on the air so I figured I’d again get on around 1230z (7:30am local time ) and that is what I did. It would allow me to operate the rest of the contest without having to schedule any off time of at least 1 hour. I started off on 20m again working up and down the band. EU was strong and working stations wasn’t an issue. I stayed on 20m for almost 2 hours before switching to 15m again and stayed there for about 1.5 hours working stations I could hear. If I could hear them, they could hear me. Just before 1500z (10:00am local) I worked my first VU2 station in India who was calling CQ on 15m. He was up and down and I hope he was able to log me on his end. After working 15m I switched back and forth between 20m and 15m with some short runs calling CQ on 20m. Around 2030z (3:30 pm local) I picked a frequency up the band around 14.120 and was able to hold it for 1 hour logging 46 contacts from the US and EU.

I  stayed on 15 & 20m through 2300z (6:00pm local) as there were stations to log including AL9A in Alaska which was the last one I logged before moving to 40m. I logged 5 different Alaska stations this weekend, all with strong signals on 20m. I was able to work just 1 station in Japan but he was in the log. I finished up the last hour of the contest on 40m. I was able to log an additional 62 contacts on 15m giving me a total of 130 contacts on the band. Prior to this contest I had only logged a total of 425 contacts on 15m since being on HF. I did more then 30% of my total prior 15m contacts in just this one weekends contest. I wonder when 10m will give me this same thrill?

Some quick stats on my logging shows 858 total contacts (860 minus 2 dupes that worked me when I was calling CQ) consisting of 668 unique call signs. I logged contacts in 24 of the 40 CQ zones and 47 of the 50 states just missing nearby states of Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. I logged contacts in a total of 70 different DXCC entities with India being hopefully a new one for me. On 15m I logged 45 different DXCCs out of the 130 contacts. There were 436 different call sign prefixes logged which is a multiplier in this contest. I am very pleased with my performance and can’t wait for the next contest. I’m glad today is a holiday in the US though :-)

Here is my score summary from N1MM which worked flawlessly along with MMTTY on my new computer:

Band   QSOs    Pts  WPX
3.5    143     354   65
7      128     418   65
14     457     899  240
21     130     316   66
Total  858    1987  436

Score : 866,332

73 and good DX!
K2DSL

I was looking forward to some 10m contacts in a 10-10 contest but every time I checked I heard nothing. I didn’t hear a single 10m operator over the entire weekend contest. Other then the 10m contest I didn’t think I would do much else other then some random contacts but it didn’t work out that way.

I had purchased and received a brand new notebook Fri night and started working on that until 3:30am early Sat morning. Part of what I setup was Ham Radio Deluxe, N1MM and MMTTY. It went surprisingly smoothly. I will write about it in a subsequent post.

I started out making some QSO Party contacts with Minnesota stations. Ended up with 21 SSB contacts. With the VT and DE QSO Parties I made a small number during Sat evening with 1 VT & 3 DE contacts.

What I spent most time on the air with this weekend was the Mexico RTTY contest. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t plan on participating in it but with 10m dead and what seemed like a good amount of activity, I jumped in. Saturday afternoon into the evening and then Sun morning I ended up making a total of 213 contacts across 4 bands with most contacts on 20m followed by 40m. Did mostly S&P but also had a couple of short runs including a nice DX run mid morning Sunday. There was a good amount of participation from the XE stations.

After the Mexico RTTY contest ended I popped over to SSB and worked 8 New Mexico stations in the NM QSO Party. So in total I worked 5 separate contests and 246 total contest contacts.

Next weekend is the CQ WPX RTTY contest so I will be in that one as much as possible over the weekend.

Here’s the score summary from the Mexico RTTY contest:

Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty  Sec
3.5      28      60    2    1
  7      50     124   11    5
 14     126     331   26   13
 21       9      23    4    1
Total   213     538   43   20

Score : 33,894


See you on the air!
K2DSL