Saturday was the Volta RTTY contest and I was looking forward to a day of RTTY contesting. Got on the radio at the start of the contest (8am ET) and there wasn’t a lot of activity, or was there? I had a horrible noise problem just on 20m. Other bands (G5RV antenna) were fine but 20m sounded like someone was frying an egg. I checked often throughout the day and the noise persisted.

With the noise problem, I had a hard time pulling in DX stations. US stations, most Canadian and Mexican stations were fine. Loud DX stations were a piece of cake and whenever I could hear someone they could hear me. So I worked what I could and took many breaks from the radio, popping back once in a while to see if the noise was there and if there were any new stations I could hear.

Around 6:15pm I got on for a check and the noise was gone, the band very quiet (except for RTTY signals) and I was able to make a few easy DX contacts before I had to leave to go to my younger daughters lacrosse game. How come the best activity is always when I have something else to do? After the game, my wife and I were heading into NYC to go into the NBC studio to watch Saturday Night Live. So my radio time was likely done for the contest since I wasn’t getting home until the very wee hours of the morning. That might not have been a big deal except I woke up the morning before at 4:30 from a wicked rain storm passing through and I was tired.

I don’t know what the noise was and it isn’t there today so I hope it doesn’t come back back, whatever it was. It was a fun contest in seeing how things are scored. It’s easily my highest score (1 million plus points submitted) even with just 67 contacts, off which 2 were 0 points. Seems this contest doesn’t count call signs in your DXCC with the same call area as you (in the call sign, not physically as N2BJ is in Illinois). But to see your points jump up drastically was a lot of fun and I will definitely participate next year, hopefully without noise and with more time to get on the air.

I logged 1 new DXCC from T77NM in San Marino. Since it doesn’t seem that he uses LoTW, I sent off a QSL card direct to him in hopes of getting a new one confirmed when he QSLs. I had 1 non-20m contact and that was a US station I logged just checking the other bands when I couldn’t stand the noise on 20m. Since it was the middle of the day, there was no 40m stations on but this one. Even though I wouldn’t win any award, I submitted my log as a 20m only effort. Below is my score summary from N1MM.

        Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty   Sec
           7       1       2    0    1
          14      66     657   15    9
       Total      67     659   15   10

            Score : 1,103,825

73,
K2DSL

I had just a little radio time this weekend and along with the 7 call area QSO Party and the Indiana QSO Party was the New England QSO Party. I made a few contacts on Sat and some on Sunday. New England is close to me so I need to make contacts on 40m and 80m. Well there was very little activity on 40m (and none on 80) when I was at the radio. Later in the day 40m activity picked up and I was able to log some contacts. Ended up with 36 total, mostly on 40m split been SSB phone contacts and CW contacts.

I logged a phone and CW contact with W1MX/100 which is the MIT station that was operating the NEQP and wrote out a QSL card for those 2 Q’s.

Also during the day I logged a 20m phone contact with 5B4AIF which is in Cyprus (about 5.5k miles away) and got a nice signal report. I sent a QSL card direct to EB7DX, the QSL manager for the station.

73,
K2DSL

This weekend are 3 QSO Parties among other contests. The Indiana and 7 Area QSO Parties were just running on Saturday. The New England QSO Party also has a 2nd session today. On Saturday I had very little time to get on the radio, but when I did I was able to make 6 phone contacts with IN stations and 12 phone contacts with 7 area stations. In the 7 call area I made 4 contacts with Arizona, 2 with Oregon, 3 with Nevada, 2 with Montana and 1 with Utah.

I was hoping to make a contact with W7SUR (Spencer) in Utah as I’ve been emailing him back and forth about setting up his SignaLink, but I didn’t hear him on the area when I had a few moments to get on.

On Saturday I also logged 8 contacts in the New England QSO Party including a contact with W1MX/100 which is the MIT Radio Society station celebrating their 100th year. They are probably the only US station I’ll send a QSL card for this weekends contacts. I just looked on their web page and it says no SASE is required for a return QSL. I wonder if they don’t want them, or they will still reply even if I send one? I imagine after this weekend there will be a lot of QSL cards coming in.

73,
K2DSL

I wasn’t dedicated to contesting this weekend and did a bunch of other things, but I did participate in 2.1 contests this weekend. There was a 1 day RTTY contest and a 2 session Florida QSO Party that spanned Sat and Sun. The 0.1 contest was I logged 2 Nebraska QSO Party ops as I was tuning around the FL QSO Party.

The SP DX RTTY contest summary is as follows:

        Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty   Sec   Cnt
         3.5       7      41    5    1    0
           7      34     137    9    2    0
          14      29     245   12    7    4
       Total      70     423   26   10    4

            Score : 60,912

The Florida QSO Party summary is as follows. I saw a note on one of the mailing lists that the score might need to be doubled when running low power. I’m ready to head off for the night so I’m not sure if N1MM calculated correctly or it’s really 2x what I have below.

        Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Sec
           7  LSB      9      18    0
          14  CW      60     240   36
          14  USB     41      82   22
       Total  Both   110     340   58

           Score : 19,720

I didn’t notice anything exotic about the contacts other then another Turkey contact in the SP DX RTTY contest. And some of the FL ops that were moving between counties were just phenomenal with how many counties they hit and how good they are with CW.

Interesting that there were multiple times where FL stations were so on top of each other it was as if they were on the exact same frequency, which they might have been. They probably couldn’t hear each other on 20m but it must have been confusing when people were calling them.

I also logged 4M5M which is a special event station in Venezuela for International Marconi Day. Odd way to QSL though which I hadn’t seen before. I sent to a US station but need to include $$ for return postage because it’s coming back from Venezuela. Just happens to be the first time I’ve seen any QSL work like that.

73,
K2DSL

Had a little free time on Saturday evening and Sunday morning so I made some contacts in the GA QSO Party. I thought I’d hear more operators on then I did but maybe it was the holiday weekend that caused there to be less folks on the air. On Sunday morning I was only on for a short time and there wasn’t a lot of activity so most contacts were Saturday late in the day/early in the evening.

Thanks to all the Georgia apps for the contacts. As always, QSO Party contest ops take the time to thank those calling in and it makes for a generally more pleasant QSO, even if it is still short.

The score summary from N1MM shows:

        Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Sec
         3.5  CW       2      4    0
         3.5  LSB      1      1    0
           7  CW      13      26   11
           7  LSB     23      23   18
          14  CW      12      24   12
          14  USB      4      4    2
       Total  Both    55      82   43

            Score : 3,526

73,
K2DSL

It’s been a week and I haven’t posted my summary from the CQ WPX SSB contest last weekend.  I made contacts with 63 different DXCCs, 2 of which were new entities for me. The new entities were Haiti and Mozambique. I logged Q’s with 45 of the 50 states.  There was a nice 15m opening where I had a contact with Falkland Islands and South Africa which is 8,000 miles from me and my longest 15m contact to date.

80m on Friday evening of the contest was fine, but it was horrible on Saturday evening and for the end of the contest on Sunday. There were no US stations on 80m because of the noise/static so I probably missed lots of additional multipliers as well as some of the missing 5 states which are close by to me and 80m would be the preferred band to make a contact with them on. But all in all, a very good effort for me and I feel good about my showing.

        Band    QSOs    Pts  WPX
         3.5      69     153   44
           7     110     191   58
          14     211     417  146
          21      28      65   17
       Total     418     826  265

            Score : 218,890

Since my last posting, I’ve received a QSL card for a contact with PJ5NA in St Eustatius confirming my only contact so far with that DXCC entity.  I still stand at 99 confirmed on LoTW and with the new QSL card I have 17 other DXCCs confirmed for a total of 116 DXCCs confirmed.

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the BARTG RTTY contest. I knew I couldn’t participate on Sunday due to some other obligations, but I wanted to make a lot of contacts while I was able to get on.

I was able to get on Friday night for a few hours, most of Saturday and then the final 2 hours on Sunday evening. I did a lot of S&P but I also felt comfortable going into run mode a few times. At least with this contest I was able to find decent frequencies to get that going.  If I could have gotten a couple more hours on 20m on Sunday I might have been able to get some more DX multiplers.   If nothing much changes from what is on 3830, I did pretty good in the SOAB LP division. We’ll have to see what the final results show.

        Band    QSOs    Pts   Cty  Sec   Cnt
         3.5      61      61    7   11    3
           7     128     128    9   16    0
          14     126     126   29   13    3
       Total     315     315   45   40    6

            Score : 160,650

Besides the BARTG, I made 5 SSB contacts in the ND QSO Party, 5 contacts (2 CW & 3 SSB) in the OK QSO Party, 6 SSB contacts in the VA QSO Party and 25 contacts (14 CW & 11 SSB) in the Russian DX.

73,
K2DSL