I had an obligation on Friday evening at the start of the contest so I got on the air a couple hours after the start and was on for just over 1 hour before I turned the radio off. 20m had no activity when I got on so I went to 40m and made some contacts before heading to 80m. I made a total of 28 contacts in that hour with all but 2 being North American contacts.  The weather on Friday was rainy and unseasonably cold and that was for the forecast for the entire weekend.

Saturday morning, after dropping off my oldest daughter to take her PSATs (poor kid) I fired up the rig on 20m at 1200z. At least there’s some DX active on 20m that I can hear and they can hear me. Made a bunch of contacts in S&P mode and as I moved up the band I heard E21YDP in Thailand calling CQ with no one coming back to him. I had heard him for a short time last weekend during the Makrothen RTTY contest but couldn’t get through before I could no longer hear him. I put out my call and he immediately came back to me. After sending my info he confirmed the exchanged and I just logged my first contact of any kind with Thailand! I then watched him make a few more contacts with 100% copy on my screen before moving on. 20m was fine but 15m seemed empty every time I popped over to see if I could get any mults. Right around 2100z both days the JA stations came onto 20m and I think I worked each one I heard/saw spotted for a total of 8 JA contacts over the weekend. I am sure there were more then 8 JA stations but I didn’t hear any others. I also worked Barry in South Africa – same as last year. 40m ws so-so late on Saturday and 80m wasn’t so hot. I made ten NY QSO Party contacts on SSB and 2 on RTTY when it was real slow in the evening.

On Sunday I started out in the morning on 20m and made DX contacts until late in the morning and the US stations on the western half were awake when I made more US contacts. I continued to work stations until around 1700z when football started. It wasn’t a good game but I watched most of it. I got back on the radio, but it was harder to find stations I hadn’t worked. 15m was still quiet, at least for me. When I went into run mode, it wasn’t as productive as S&Ping as I could call for 10 mins and get just a few stations coming back to me. It was probably the contest that was easiest to find a spot to call CQ as it wasn’t wall to wall.  Late in the day there was again some activity on 40m but not what I would have expected and 80m had no one on it.

Maybe it was the multiple QSO Parties and the Worked all Germany contest that occupied folks that go on the air this weekend or maybe it was the upcoming CQ WW SSB contest and folks were resting up, but it seemed less active then I would have expected.  Once all the results are in, I guess I might be able to compare the overall activity. Comparing my score to last year I was down 37 contacts and 6,709 points.

2009 JARTS RTTY Score Summary:

Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty   Sec
 3.5      34      69    1   11
   7      54     118   10   14
  14     258     664   43   17
  21       2       5    1    1
 Total   348     856   55   43

 Score : 83,888

73,
K2DSL

I had a lot of non-contesting activities this weekend so I had a very part time effort in this years Makrothen RTTY contest. It is a 24 hour contest broken up into three 8 hour sessions over the course of the weekend. I put in a couple hours on Fri night and a few hours on Saturday in the late afternoon / early evening after my local clubs hamfest all morning and a high school football game in the afternoon. I was able to get on the air for just 1 hour on Sunday morning before heading out to the NY Giants football game.

What is neat about this contest is the points for each contact are based on distance as calculated between my grid square and the other operators grid square which is part of the exchange. In addition, contacts on 40m are worth a 50% bonus and contacts on 80m are worth a 100% bonus. It’s also why the scores are so high in this contest.

For the most part I operated S&P but I went into Run mode a couple times and was surprised to have many DX stations call me including South Africa which was my longest contact in the contest at over 8100 miles. I also had an Alaska station call me and then spot me which gave me a nice run of station after station for a few minutes.  I also had a contact with a station in Panama. I don’t have Panama confirmed for DXCC yet so I sent a QSL card off to the US based QSL manager for the station and I hope to get a reply to have that one confirmed.

Below is my score summary:

Band    QSOs    Pts
 3.5      15   35610
 7        38  147108
 14      129  531984
 Total   182  714702

 Score : 714,702

QSL cards have already been written for new contacts made and ready to be sent out via the bureau.

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend I didn’t think I’d be doing any contesting, but as things ended up, I had the afternoon and early evening free on Saturday and the California QSO Party was in full swing, so I started making contacts.  I ended up making about 120 contacts on Saturday. On Sunday before the football games began I made more contacts and ended up with 186 total contacts. There are 58 counties in California and I was able to make contact with 55 of them. This QSO Party was tremendous fun and the ops were fantastic. I’ll definitely try and catch this QSO Party next year.

I’d like to note a nice contact with Budd, W3FF, of Buddipole fame. Though I don’t have one, I do follow the Buddipole Yahoo group. Budd made a point of having a brief chat with anyone he made contact with during this contest. This was my 2nd contact with Budd with the earlier contact being in Feb 2009 where he was golf cart mobile near Orlando.

Here’s my score summary:

Band   Mode  QSOs    Pts  Sec
  7    LSB      4      8    0
 14    CW      46    138    6
 14    USB    121    242   49
 21    CW       1      3    0
 21    USB     14     28    0
 Total Both   186    419   55

 Score : 23,045

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the 2009 CQ WW RTTY contest, one of the big RTTY contests over the course of the year.

I got a late start on the first night missing the first couple hours because of family obligations so I spent a couple hours on 40m and 80m making contacts before calling it an early night.

Saturday I was able to spend a good part of day on the radio and worked 20m throughout the day switching to 15m occasionally. 15m is a weak band for me on my G5RV but I can usually make a few contacts local in the US or to Central/South American stations that are strong. More then anything, 15m is good for multipliers and occasionally a country I don’t have on 20m or 40m. I saw some new DXCC’s on 20m on Sat but they had big pile ups and with 100w I decided to just move along and come back if they were on later. Other then a couple of brief attempts in Run mode with not enough activity to warrant the effort, I did S&P mode for most of the contest.

As the sun started to get low in the sky I alternated between 40m and 20m as 20m was still active. As the evening was in full swing I alternated between 40m and 80m and occasionaly 20m to see if anything new popped up. Though this is a DX contest, there are multipliers for each US State on each band so it is worth working local contacts as well. I didn’t stay up late and even took breaks in the evening to watch a movie.

Sun morning I woke up and for most of the day I was able to be on the radio, working 20m and switching from time to time to 15m to see if anything new could be heard. Before noon I emailed a nearby club member working the contest and we were about neck and neck. I did notice he had more countries on 15m then I did even though he had less 15m contacts showing that maybe a dedicated 15m dipole or one string in a different direction might help vs the G5RV. He was heading out for a while but I was going to keep going for a couple hours before the NY Giants football game started. When the game came on, I watched it for about 3.5 hours before getting back on the radio. I worked 20m again until dusk and then started switching to 40m and then to 80m again as I did the day before.

When the whistle blew at 00:00z I had logged 578 contacts and ended up with 343,840 points beating last years totals (see CQ WW RTTY Contest post). After reviewing the log I ended up logging 69 different DXCC entities, 20 different zones,  478 unique stations, 41 US states and 9 Canadian Providences. It doesn’t look like I logged any new entities this time around.

I logged 6 Alaska stations that were all booming into NJ on Sunday. One even commented on how strong I was. I also logged 3 Japanese stations over the weekend which is always a nice treat. I find it funny how I can log 6 stations in Alaska yet it wasn’t until 45 mins left in the entire contest that I logged a station from Georgia – go figure.

I worked 2 stations on all 4 bands I operated and 13 stations on 3 bands. Of the 578 total contacts with 478 unique stations, 334 were non-US/Canadian stations  and 178  I had previously worked giving me a contact with 156 new DX stations. Germany was the non-US/Canadian country with 31 contacts followed by European Russia with 21 and Italy with 16.

I really enjoy RTTY contests whether they are 2 full days or a couple of hours long. It is a fun mode and with my modest 100w station and a G5RV wire antenna it provides a tremendous amount of excitement. Many thanks to all the operators both US and international that pulled my weak signal out to allow me to log another contact. After the contest I uploaded my logs to eQSL and LoTW and there were already many that were confirmed with about 100 confirmed on LoTW within 3 hours of the contest ending and even more this morning when I checked before heading off to work.

Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty   ZN  Sec
 3.5      52      76    9    7   22
 7       128     218   34   14   38
 14      350     834   65   20   32
 21       46     100   17   11   11
Total    576    1228  125   52  103

Score : 343,840

73,
K2DSL

Saturday night was the NA Sprint for SSB. Someone calls CQ, you come back to them, you exchange names, serial numbers and states and then the person that was calling CQ has to QSY to another frequency and the other station takes over the frequency to call CQ. It’s fast and a lot of fun.

I was very busy on Saturday and didn’t get home until the 4 hour contest was half over, so I only participated for 2 hours. Ops were already on 40m so I didn’t have any 20m contacts. Conditions weren’t bad on 40m but a lot noisier on 80m. I ended up making a contact with 29 different states including ND, ID & WY and 2 Canadian Providences. I heard 2 different Alaska stations on 40m coming in strong but in a sprint like this, the loudest station is usually the one that wins until later on when the loudest stations have already worked most stations, but I didn’t hear Alaska much after I first heard them.

I made a total of 52 contacts in the 2 hours which isn’t bad. It’s nice when the op on the other end says things like ‘Nice to hear you David” or recognizes a portion of your call and completes your call and knows your name.  I find this style contest on SSB to be very friendly and I enjoy it a lot.  The RTTY version of this contest is mid Oct and then then the CW, SSB and RTTY contests all have a 2nd running in Feb/March. Maybe I’ll see you then!

Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec
3.5     37      37   22
7      15      15    9
Total    52      52   31

Score : 1,612

73,
K2DSL

Wanted to work the VHF contest with my local radio club but due to weather it was called off. I still thought about putting up a 2 meter beam on fiberglass poles but weather on Sat was really poor with steady rain all day.

So I got on HF and participated in the WAE SSB contest. What is different about the WAE contests are QTCs. I knew I could only operate on Saturday as football season starts and I go to all the home games. Other then 1 contact and QTC batch I made all contacts on 20m. Conditions we’re ok and for the most part was able to work any station that I heard or showed up in the cluster.

I was able to send two batches of QTCs which provide to the other op up to 10 previous callsigns indicated the time I made the contact, the operators call sign and his report to me. It ends up giving me and the DX op an additional 10 contacts. I could have given more but I was obviously not in it for the points and just did so when asked by the DX operator.

After coming home from the football game on Sunday evening I processed the logs out of N1MM and into my main logging program, Ham Radio Deluxe, started writing out QSL cards, uploading the contacts to LoTW and eQSL and sent the log in.  I had about the same contacts this year as I did last year when I was just getting started in contesting.

73,
K2DSL

I have a lot of fun participating in contests even if I can only make a few contacts in some. The hardest part about contesting is knowing what contests are coming up and finding the time to set aside to participate. Below are the top places I look for contest calendar information on the web. Always remember to check out the rules on the official site for each of the contests to understand the classes, exchange, times and other important rules that need to be followed, along with the log submission deadline.

My top site is WA7BNM’s with links to What’s Next Week and the Perpetual Contest Calendar which shows all contests for the year and future years. It’s the site I visit the most for contest info. You can also get a weekly email that contains a text version of what is coming up over the following week by sending an email – instructions at the bottom of this page.

The ARRL Contest site is a good resource for what is coming up this month and next. I really enjoy the ARRL Contest Newsletter which is sent out via email every other week and is available online as well.

Another site is the SM3CER Contest Service web site. I’ve seen some inaccuracies with the info and emailed the site but never got a response nor were the errors corrected. I also don’t like that the home page uses a java applet which causes java to load up, and on my slower notebook, it’s inconvenient.

There’s also the Contesting.com web site which is a landing page to many contest related links such as the CQ-Contest reflector where you can view the archives or subscribe to the mailing list and receive individual or digest (batched) versions of the posts.And underway is the Wiki Contest Compednium which might end up being another invaluable source for staying on top of what is going on and what is coming up.

73,
K2DSL

I wasn’t on the radio much this weekend but made a few contacts in the SCC RTTY and Kansas QSO Party.  Below are the score summaries for each.

SCC RTTY

 Band    QSOs     Pts  Exc   N/A
 14        19      40   15    0
 Total     19      40   15    0

 Score : 600

Kansas QSO Party

Band     Mode  QSOs    P ts  Sec
 14      CW      10      30    9
 14      USB     23      46   19
 Total  Both     33      76   28

 Score : 2,128

With a few of the Kansas Ops I had a nice QSO when they came back to me and recognized my call.  A few rovers were very active and in a couple instances I was lucky to catch them on a county boundary and able to log multiple counties at the same time.

73,
K2DSL

Looking back on the 2008 Ohio QSO Party, I seem to have made about twice the number of contacts which is likely helped by the ability to make CW contacts, of which I made 21 CW contacts on 40m & 80m this year. This year I made 50 total contacts with Ohio stations.

I received a bunch of good signal reports and as always, QSO Party ops are as friendly as can be. My logs have already been uploaded to LoTW, eQSL and sent to the contest sponsor.

Band    Mode  QSOs     Pts  Sec
 3.5    CW       8      16    6
 3.5    LSB      9       9    3
 7      CW      13      26   13
 7      LSB     20      20   17
 Total  Both    50      71   39

 Score : 2,769

Thanks all you ops out in Ohio!

73,
K2DSL