This past weekend was the very popular CQ Worldwide CW contest. As I’m still getting up to speed on morse code, I use DM780 to help decode the incoming morse code not unlike a RTTY signal. It works extremely well and allows me to participate.

I got a bit of a late start on Friday after attending a local ham radio auction.  I made 33 contacts in just under 2 hours on 40m and some local 80m contacts to add as multipliers.

On Saturday I got up and started on 20m working mostly Europe.  After a couple hours I checked 15m and worked some Europe and Caribbean / South American stations. I’m weak on 15m with my G5RV but in most cases if I can hear a station, they can hear me.  I even checked 10m and made a contact with HI3A in the Dominican Republic and NQ4I in Georgia. I also worked V5VQ on 10m with the other couple being US stations for multipliers. The rest of Saturday was spent on 20m and 15m until I left at 2100z (4pm ET) to a party for a few hours. When I got back home I got on the air for 1 hour on 40m making contact with European and Caribbean/South America stations.

Sunday morning when I turned the radio on I was still on 40m from the night before and the station on the frequency was a Hawaii station that I was able to make contact with. 1 Mhz away was VK6AA in Australia booming in on 40m and was able to make a contact on just the first or second call. After a couple more 40m contacts I switched to 20m and then 15m throughout the day before hitting 40m & 80m at the end of the contest.

New DXCCs logged in the 2 days leading up to the event were with Faroe Island, Botswanna and Somoa. During CQ WW I logged contacts with 3 additional new DXCCs in Madagascar, Guernsey and Zambia.

I logged 25 CQ zones with all but 1 on 20m which was the Australian station logged on just 40m. I wasn’t able to copy any Asian stations such as those in Japan, etc. Zone 5 I worked on 5 bands of 10m-80m and zones 14 & 33 I worked on 4 bands of 15m-80m.  I had the most Q’s to zones 15 & 14 followed by zones 8 & 5.

I worked a total of 86 DXCC’s with 5 on 80m, 44 on 40m, 71 on 20m, 39 on 15m and 3 on 10m. The 366 contacts were made with 286 distinct stations., 18 of which I worked on 3 bands.  Canada had the most Q’s followed by Germany and Spain. I logged 13 US contacts all for multipliers as US stations provide no points to me.

I am truly amazed at the ability for operators to decode morse code at the speed it is sent as well as the multiple signals (seems like a hundred at a time) coming at them and even the weak signals. It’s really fascinating that they can do it is so well.

Here’s my score summary:

 Band  QSOs     Pts  Cty   ZN
 3.5     10      21    5    4
 7       79     203   45   16
 14     210     589   72   24
 21      62     159   39   15
 28       5       4    3    3
 Total  366     976  164   62

 Score : 220,576

Log has been sent in as well as uploaded to LoTW, eQSL, HRDLog.net and Clublog.org. The QSLs are already coming in on eQSL and LoTW. Now to fill out the paper QSLs!

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the ARRL SSB Sweepstakes ham radio contest. I was able to put in time on Saturday evening, Sunday morning and later in the day on Sunday. In total it looks like I was on the radio about 17-18 hours total which is a pretty good amount.

I was able to make 362 total contacts across 72 of the 80 possible ARRL/RAC sections. 47 of the 50 states had a logged contact missing just Alaska, Mississippi (again like in the CW contest) and North Dakota. I didn’t hear any AK or MS stations but I did hear a ND station but he had a big pile up and I needed to leave to go to a NY Giants football game, just like in the 2008 SSB Sweepstakes.

80m was the best band for me, especially since I wasn’t able to be on the radio during the prime 20m time on Sunday. There was very little noise on 80m on Saturday with some noise on Sunday but nothing bad at all. I mainly did S&P with a few shorter attempts in Run mode. I went into run mode later on Sunday and did well with about 40 calls logged in 30 mins with some spurts of 2 a min for a couple of minutes in a row. Though 80m was the best for number of logged Q’s, 20m provided the most sections but that could just be because I started on 20m so everything was a new section.

I didn’t work any QRP stations this time which is not too surprising since in SSB mode it’s harder for them to be in run mode and I was S&Ping. I did log 4 Schools based on their precedence.

The top 5 sections logged were MDC, VA, NC, EPA and ENY. The top 5 states logged were MD, VA, CA, NY & PA.

For the year first licensed in ham radio, the top responses in the exchange were 76, 77, 58, 59 & 62. Three of the oldest were 12 from W4CA and 22 from K2CC and W8FT. All 3 are clubs/schools and indicate when they were first operational.

It was nice to hear my name or a quick hello from other ops that I’ve worked many times in the past.  It’s easy to be a bit more personal in a phone contest then with the canned RTTY and CW exchanges sent by macros. I also received some good signal/audio reports. It was funny that not long after I got back on the air from returning from the Giants football game I got a great audio report. After yelling loudly for a few hours I would have figured a report of “you’re losing your voice” would have been more appropriate.

eQSL & LoTW have been updated and the log sent to the ARRL. Below is my log summary for the contest. It’s a lot of fun and I can’t wait for the next sweepstakes.

 Band   QSOs     Pts  Sec
 3.5     231     462   24
 7        51     102   14
 14       75     150   31
 21        5      10    3
 Total   362     724   72

 Score : 52,128

73,
K2DSL

As mentioned in After a ham radio contest – what needs to be done?, there are many items to do after a contest finishes with one if them being the posting of your score to the 3830 reflector (mailing list). For a week or two after a contest, some folks take all the claimed scores that are posted to 3830, aggregate them by which classes people operated in, and then send out the info to the list.

I might never be on top, but what I do for those contests I participate in is compare what I did for number of contacts, number of multipliers and total score to what others in the same operating class posted. In particular I look to see if folks with less contacts then me posted a higher score which means they were likely able to log more multipliers then I did. I look and see for those in the same general count for total contacts how I compare. I like to see, for the claimed scores posted to 3830, that no one with a higher score in my class has less contacts then me and I like to see those with more contacts with me with a lower score. An example (calls removed) is the following:

Call                QSO   Pts   QTC  Mult    hr      Score
xx8xxx             239   239   190   254           108,966
xx3xxx             247   247   140   259     14    100,233
xx2xxx             286   286    30   302     17     95,432
K2DSL              158   348   190   163    5.5     56,724 
xx1xxx             162   247    85   226  11.25     55,822
xx6xxx             138   138     0   345      4     47,610
xx7xxx             206   206    40   172            42,312
xx7xxx             250     0     0     0      6     36,750

Looking at the above, my comparison to the others is what I’d like to see with the only glaring comparison being the bottom entry with 250 contacts in 6 hours vs my 158 in 5.5 hours. But I also pulled down 190 QTCs which takes some time but no where near the time to make those same number of contacts. I was only in Run mode a couple of times and for short periods of time.

Though not mandatory and certainly a bit more subjective, if an operator posts his time in the contest I look to see how those around me compare to the time I spent participating.  Of course without knowing the other operators setups and I’m using a G5RV wire antenna and he might have a 20m beam at 75 feet, it is all speculation. My location being on the east coast might also, for some contests, provide an advantage over someone on the west coast or midwest. In other contests, they have an advantage over me.

Depending on the size of the contest I check out other classes such as those in the high power (HP) class and see how my numbers match up with those around my score or number of contacts.

Its obviously only a comparison against those that post to 3830 and it is claimed scores vs actual results, but it gives me something to think about before next weekends contest. If there are folks in my club or that I know also participated in the contest I email them about what they did, what bands they found worked well, time of day, etc.

It all just adds more info to the noggin for possible use in the future.

73,
K2DSL

I was only able to spend a total of 5.5 hours on the radio this weekend of which the first hour was very late on Saturday evening making local (US) contacts. The 5.5 hours this year was much less then the 28-30 hours I was able to put into the 2008 WAE RTTY contest last year.That’s about 1/5th the amount of time on the radio.

This year I was much more comfortable with QTCs and N1MM makes QTCs simple as pie, so I was more then happy to receive or send QTCs to any European stations. Last year in 2008 I made 420 contacts and this year 158 contacts.  Last year I had 188 QTCs and this year 190 in a fraction of the time.

I didn’t make any contact with any new DXCCs and didn’t make any exotic contacts but it’s fun none the less and I still enjoy RTTY contesting the most of all. I only had a little over a dozen paper QSL cards to write out and they are already done. eQSL and LoTW have been uploaded and confirmations have already been made.

Here’s my score summary.

Band   Q/QTC  QSOs    Pts  Cty
 3.5    QSO    20      20   56
 7      QSO     9       9   15
 14     QSO   123     123   80
 14    RQTC   110     110    0
 14    SQTC    70      70    0
 21     QSO     6       6   12
 21    RQTC    10      10    0
 Total  All   348     348  163

 Score : 56,724

Hopefully next time I’ll be able to spend more time in the chair and on the air.

73,
K2DSL

The June VHF contest results have been posted at http://www.arrl.org/contests/results

My local club is the Bergen Amateur Radio Association (BARA) and we operate the VHF contests from a location on top a mountain that is a previous location of a Nike Missile Base. We setup 2 towers, 2 tents to operate in, put up 144, 220, 440 and 6m antennas on the towers and run off generators for the weekend. We start Saturday afternoon and shutdown midday on Sunday, so we don’t operate the entire time the contest is running.

Our club call is K2BAR and it looks like we finished 37th overall in the contest, 11th in our class, 1st in the Hudson Division (!!!!) & 1st in ENY (East New York). We show as 5th in our class in the Northeast Region which covers the following divisions: New England, Hudson and Atlantic Divisions; Maritime and Quebec Sections.

I think for this contest I stayed in my vehicle overnight 3am-6am when I had the generators off and took a quick nap. When I woke up, I fired up the generators and got back on the air just before some others started coming back to get on the air. It’s a lot of work with a small group of folks to load up a truck with all the tower parts, cables, tents, chairs, generators, etc, travel to the site, put up the towers, setup the equipment, operate and then take everything down and return it to storage.  It sure makes it worthwhile when we have a good time operating and are rewarded with a good result!

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the ARRL CW Sweepstakes where you try to work as many US/Canadian stations as you can. I was able to put in close to 13 hours over the course of the weekend and ended up with 314 contacts.

There are 80 sections across the US and Canada and I logged a contact in 76 of them missing just MS in the US and NL, NWT and SK in Canada. I heard a NWT station in a big pile up but moved on and didn’t hear them again. I heard a SK station late Sunday after returning to the radio but he faded right after I tuned to him.

What I did for this contest is just start at the low end of each band and tune up, stopping for any station I heard. I wasn’t connected to the DX packet cluster but each station I heard shows up on my band cluster.  If I notice a gap, I go back and see if I just missed a station or there is really no one there. After I get to the top of the band, I look back and hit any stations I could log or if there was any open spaces on the band I might have missed one. I then either switched bands or started at the bottom again.

I used N1MM for logging and DM780 (part of Ham Radio Deluxe) to decode the CW signal. The combination worked extremely well. Last night after the contest ended I was able to quickly export the N1MM file and import it and process it into Ham Radio Deluxe. A US/Canadian contest like this is easier since almost all are in QRZ with valid contact info and grid locator info. Since I don’t normally send QSL cards out to US and Canadian stations, there isn’t much to do after this one ended.

I was happy with my performance and still expect to spend some time learning CW so I don’t have to rely on a program like DM780, though seeing it all in print is certainly helpful. It let’s me capture the transmission while entering the exchange into N1MM and sending my exchange simultaneously. Hopefully some day it will all become second nature and it seems is the case for many others.

I stayed on 20m, 40m and 80m and didn’t even tune to 15m because there’s no band multipliers nor can you work the same station on multiple bands. A fellow club member sent me his score summary and he had s bunch on 15m. Maybe I should have tuned around and checked it out at least once during the day on Sunday.

I worked KL7AF from Alaska again on Sunday after hearing him on Sat with a large pile up. I worked 3 or 4 Hawaii stations on the 1st or 2nd that were all loud and able to  hear me without issue. I’ll have to see if I get a few LoTW confirmations for different bands for some states. I noticed one already for Maryland on 20m CW which was confirmed after I uploaded my log last night. I also worked Randy K5ZD for the first time on CW. Randy is the CQ WPX Contest Director who I have also had some email conversations with, even earlier in the weekend for entering in paper logs for others and some possible programming to help things out for his contests.

Here’s my score summary for this weekends activity:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec
 3.5     104     208   26
   7      90     180   15
  14     120     240   35
 Total   314     628   76

 Score : 47,728

Thanks for the contacts and 73,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the big CQ WW SSB contest. I had other obligations Friday night, during the late day & evening on Saturday and almost all afternoon and evening on Sunday. But despite limited time, the contest was a blast.  I had a sore throat all week and had nearly lost my voice, so it was a bit rough starting out on Fri and getting going on Sat & Sun mornings, but it didn’t bother me too much once I was warmed up.

We had horrible weather too on Saturday with downpours during the afternoon and evening. It just never let up. But despite the weather, the conditions during the contest were good. 80m and 40m were typical during the twilight and evening hour.  I made a combined 23 contacts on those bands because which more then anything helped with multipliers.

On Saturday, 20m was wall to wall. With a G5RV wire antenna, the signals are coming in from all directions, so there’s a tremendous amount of noise/splatter during a phone contest. I started making contacts on 20m and then switched to 15m to see what was going on. I was able to make a good number of contacts on 15m and at one point I had more 15m contacts then 20m. That was never the case for me before this contest. 15m is just so much quieter then 20m that it is a pleasure to work that band. I switched back and forth during the day between 15m and 20m.

On Sunday I could only work the contest during the morning and very early afternoon hours and I again switched between 15m and 20m tuning up and down the bands and then switching to another band, doing the same S&P and switching back.  I ended up with 175 total contacts which isn’t a large number, even for me, but I was pleased with it for the amount of time I could spend on the radio. I was also really happy I was able to make so many 15m contacts.

When I got home from work on Monday I checked the logs and I ended up with contacts to 66 DXCC entities. None of them were new, but I already have some new 15m confirmations showing up in LoTW for entities I hadn’t received confirmations for in that band.  I spent Monday evening taking the log from N1MM and importing it into Ham Radio Deluxe. I sent off the logs to the contest sponsor on Monday or Tuesday morning.

Thanks to all the ops for pulling my little 100w signal out of the air and a special thanks for all the ops that took a moment to say hello along with their report. In a phone contest it’s nice to speak with folks that I’ve made many contacts during RTTY or CW contests and we’re just running macros.  And my call is becoming familiar enough with some ops that if they catch DSL they say something like it must be K2DSL. I guess the SCP helps out with that too.

Here’s my contest summary from N1MM:

Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty   ZN
 3.5      13      25    6    5
   7      10      18    7    4
  14      93     247   53   15
  21      59     157   37   14
 Total:  175     447  103   38

 Score : 63,027

73,
K2DSL

I did some quick analysis on the contacts I made in the 2009 JARTS RTTY contest this past weekend. Because the contest exchange is the age of the operator, and assuming the age provided in the exchange is accurate, you can do some simple calculations on that age. There are 2 exceptions to the age sent and they are 00 for YLs/XYLs and 99 for multi-op stations. I excluded those values from the below calculations.

There were 348 total contacts  with 306 unique stations.  Of those 306 unique stations, 7 had an age of 00 and 6 had an age of 99 and weren’t counted in the below stats. As for myself, I’m 46 years old.

All (306 unique contacts):
Average Age:   57.9
Median Age: 59
Youngest Age: 30 (2)
Oldest Age: 84 (2)

US Only (119 unique contacts):
Average Age: 60.0
Median Age: 61
Youngest Age: 34
Oldest Age: 84

Non-US Only (132 unique contacts):
Average Age: 54.3
Median Age: 53
Youngest Age: 30
Oldest Age: 78

Canadian Only (16 unique contacts):
Average Age: 53.5
Median Age: 64
Youngest Age: 44
Oldest Age: 76

Here is a chart of the distribution of contacts by age:

73,
K2DSL

After spending as much time as you can in 48 hours over a weekend to participate in a ham radio contest, there is plenty to do when the clock hits 0000z and the contest comes to an end. I use N1MM for contest logging and I use Ham Radio Deluxe as my general logging program and where I import all contacts into if logged in N1MM.

Here’s what I do after the contest ends. Depending on the number of contacts made, the initial wrap up takes about 30 mins for a small contest to 2 hours or so for a larger contest, not counting writing out paper QSL cards.

Within N1MM:
1) Rescore the current contest to make sure everything is up to date.
2) File / Export the contacts in a ADIF file.
3) File / Export the Cabrillo log file.
4) File / Export the Score Summary sheet.
5) Go to http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/ , select the contest at the top, and submit my claimed score using the details within the N1MM Score Summary sheet.

Loading contacts into Ham Radio Deluxe:
1) Create a new logbook (database)in Ham Radio Deluxe to import the contest contacts into.
2) Logbook / Import the ADIF file exported from N1MM.
3) Bulk edit the data to remove the Name which might have been imported as well as the [Grid] Locator. Info from QRZ is better then what I might have cached in N1MM from previous contests.

Updating the imported data:
1) Using Ham Radio Deluxe Utilities (HRDU) by WD5EAE, I update My Station data using the info pulled from my default logbook.
2) Using HRDU, I then update all the imported records based on the QRZ data that matches that call sign. You need to have a QRZ  subscription which covers their XML access. It populats the name, location info, QSL info and locator if provided on the QRZ.com site.
3) Change mode from SSB to LSB/USB based on band.
4) I then run a SQL script in MS Access to compare the main Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) database to the contest one to see if there’s any stations I don’t have a grid locator for that I previously found one for. I update those in the contest database.
5) For all remaining contacts that don’t have a grid locator, I use a page I wrote at http://www.levinecentral.com/ham/grid_square.php and enter in the callsign of a station and it grabs address info from QRZ and using Google Maps geocoding determines the latitude/longitude of the location and plots it on a map along with displaying the 6 character maidenhead grid square locator.
6) For any record which didn’t find a match on QRZ.com, I use other sources such as Hamcall.net or Google searches to try and find info.

Merging the logs in Ham Radio Deluxe:
1) Within the contest logbook in Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD), File / Export all records in ADIF/HRD format to an ADIF file.
2) Open the main logbook and File / Import the ADIF file to consolidate the contest info into the main logbook.

QSLing:
1) Filter all records in the main (merged) logbook for any records where LotW Sent = No and that shows all new records just imported.
2) Select every record in Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) and send to eQSL.
3) Select every record and send to Hamlog.net.
4) I set the US and Canada contacts to QSL Sent = Ignore. I will respond to any that come in but I don’t normally send paper QSLs to US or Canadian contacts.
5) I run another QSL script in MS Access to list out any stations contacted in the contest for which I’ve previously logged (listed in the main logbook) and I set those QSL Sent = Ignore.
6) I scan through the QSL Via field of the remaining records and see if any say Direct Only or LoTW only, etc and if I don’t need to confirm them for a new entity, I set the QSL Sent = Ignore.
7) I run Ham Radio Deluxe Utilities and have it upload all new contacts to LoTW.
8) Filter records in the logbook for QSL Sent= No and those are the ones I likely write out paper QSL cards for. Writing out the paper QSL cards takes a few evenings to get done.
9) After the contest and usually every day, I launch HRDU and import in any new LoTW QSLs which updates the status in HRD.

Final steps:
1) Review the specific log submission requirements in the contest rules and submit the log to the contact sponsor.
2) Send off the score summary info to my club’s newsletter editor for the info to be posted in the next monthly issue.
3) Write a blog entry about the contest.
4) Take a nap.

73,
K2DSL