Friday night I was able to participate in my first NA RTTY Sprint contest. In a sprint, after you make a QSO, you take over the frequency for the next QSO. After the next QSO, you need to relinquish the current frequency and QSY to another frequency. I watched for a couple mins to see how the sequences went and jumped in. It’s a 4 hour contest and I was able to make 98 Q’s. Here’s the score summary:

        Band    QSOs     Pts  Sec
         3.5      57      57   16
           7      41      41   17
       Total      98      98   33

            Score : 3,234

Saturday was the Idaho QSO Party which goes from Sat afternoon through Sun afternoon for 24 total hours. I could only find and make contact with 5 different stations for 6 total contacts. I wanted to get an Idaho QSO confirmed on CW and phone for the Triple Play. At least one phone contact has been confirmed but nothing yet on the only CW contact I could find and make. I’ll keep my fingers crossed on that one. Here’s the score summary for the Idaho QSO Party:

        Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Sec
          14  CW       1      2    1
          14  RTTY     1      2    1
          14  USB      4      4    4
       Total  Both     6      8    6

            Score : 48

Sunday afternoon through the evening, the Wisconsin QSO Party ran for 7 hours.  Much easier to make contacts there. About halfway through the contest I was shooting for a Q with half the 72 counties in Wisconsin and about 10 mins before the end, I checked off county number 36.  Here’s the score summary for the Wisconsin QSO Party:

        Band  Mode  QSOs     Pts  Sec
         3.5  CW      18      36    5
         3.5  LSB      8       8    3
           7  CW      22      44   18
           7  LSB     19      19   10
       Total  Both    67     107   36

            Score : 3,852

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the ARRL International DX SSB contest. See my earlier report on the ARRL DX CW contest. The contest is between US/Canadian stations and non-US/Canadian stations (DX) with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii which are considered to be DX locations. I am a bit surprised there weren’t more stations from Mexico on.  They count as DX stations

With my modest 100w and G5RV wire antenna I was able to make 209 contacts with 155 different stations/operators. Those contacts covered 78 different DXCC entities in 19 different zones (out of 40 zones).  To show how relatively small the contesting community is, of those 155 stations I logged a QSO with, 75 of those call signs I had previously logged at least 1 QSO with, so that is almost half of the stations.

As best as I can tell, I only logged one new DXCC and that was Guinea-Bissau and the station was J5UAP. I did log a bunch of stations I don’t have any QSL confirmation on so I’m hopeful that via LoTW or a paper QSL I can get some more confirmed  I already show one of the Alaska contacts as confirmed which is good since it’s my first phone contact confirmed this year with Alaska which will help for the Triple Play Award.

The highlight for me was a large pileup late in the day on Sunday and a strong VK station in Australia was booming in. VK7ZE was clear and louder then I’ve ever heard a VK station and there was quite the pileup. It didn’t take very long and he came back with my call. How my 100w and wire made it through all the stations calling I’ll never know. Lucky is better then good. So I logged my first Australia phone contact. It shows VK7ZE as a LoTW user but I’m sending off for a paper QSL anyway!

There were 2 comments I noticed when a DX station was coming back to me, and I was silly not to note down who each was. One was an operator that came back to me with “Hey David, nice to hear you again”. Now yes, contest loggers come up with various bits of info, but regardless of it being his system which told him, it was nice that he said it.  The other comment I recall is when there was a nice pileup going for another station and he got DSL from me putting my call out and came back with “That must be K2DSL, right?”. Again, even if his software did it, it made it very personal. So though I didn’t note the specific operators, thank you!

As for working the bands, 20m was where most activity was occurring. I did my best to try and get stations (and multipliers) on 15m, but with my less then optimal setup, that’s better said then done. When 15m was open, I was able to get a long distance, but when it shut down for me, it was as if there wasn’t anyone there. A directional antenna would have definitely helped with 15m this weekend. 40m and 80m is where I was after dark, though 20m was still pretty active then too. 40m and 80m were almost 1:1 for multipliers so that definitely helps the score. Below is my score summary from N1MM. Thanks to all the operators that picked little ‘ol me up when I came a calling.

        Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty
         3.5      23      69   21
           7      33      99   29
          14     126     378   75
          21      27      81   17
       Total     209     627  142

            Score : 89,034

73,
K2DSL

After using DM780 to read/send CW to K5D using the CW KY functionality the Kenwood supports on the same serial connection, Dave K2ZC created a cable for me to connect my PC’s serial port to the key connection on the back of the radio. This is a more standard way of keying supported by programs such as N1MM as well as DM780.

With the new cable from K2ZC I jumped into the ARRL International DX CW contest this past weekend. I would listen on the frequency to get the info and then send my call out and when the DX station came back to me, it was decoded on the screen and I would respond with my report. Because it seemed most of the stations in the contest are using a computer to generate the code, the computer does an excellent job of decoding it and showing it on the screen.

I used DM780 to decode the transmission and N1MM to send/log. It all worked very well and I was able to make 209 DX Qs over the weekend. Not bad for a CW contest and not knowing morse code yet! By the end of the weekend I could pretty reliably recognize my own call, 5NN for a report and TU which is typically the first response back after sending a report.

New logged DXCCs this contest: El Salvador, San Marino and Turkey.

Here’s my score summary from my first CW contest:

        Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty
           7      67     201   38
          14     142     426   60

       Total     209     627   98

            Score : 61,446

73,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the CQ WPX RTTY contest. A single operator is allowed to work 30 hours out of the 48 hours the contest runs. I worked close to 30 of those hours. In the end I made 525 contacts.

I had a difficult time working well in run mode. Stations were packed together, overlapping and often multiple stations (different parts of the world) causing QRM on each other. I guess with a wire antenna, you can’t block out what you aren’t listening for like you can with a beam.  When I did go into run mode, I felt like I just wasn’t getting enough contacts coming back to me and I felt more productive doing S&P. I just couldn’t get any decent runs going of more then 4 or 5 stations before it seemed like I was calling CQ for minutes on end without anyone coming back.

Some of the stats from quickly analyzing the log shows I made a QSo with 46 of the 50 states only missing out on Idaho, Montanna, West Virginia and Vermont. Had a few contacts with both Hawaii and strong Alaska stations. I also logged 4 new DXCCs for me which were Nicaragua, Armenia, Corsica and Belize. Corsica is already confirmed on LoTW.

In the afternoon on Sunday I switched to 15m after seeing some spots in the cluster and made 5 quick contacts with strong signals from Uruguay and Argentina. After I made the 5th contact the band closed on me and I could hardly hear them even though they were just booming in a minute ago.

In eQSL I’ve seen 3 contacts come in which I don’t have in my log. All 3 call signs seem familiar, so either they weren’t patient enough for me to confirm (QRM and they moved on before I could confirm) or I made mistake in commiting the QSO to the log. It isn’t as if I have a contact entered like their call sign but just slightly off, so I’d say it is the former and not the latter.

Here’s my score summary:

 Band QSOs   Pts  WPX
 3.5   93    228   46
   7  135    442   77
  14  279    528  150
  21   18     44    8
Total  525  1242  281

 Score : 349,002

73,
K2DSL

This weekend I put in a very part time effort in the EPC WW DX PSK125 contest. I operated high power for up to 12 hours though I operated much less. I found PSK125 to be a rough go. It is extremely fast in transmitting but I fely the ability to get through a solid transmission was much worse then say RTTY. Ops were sending  CQ many times in a row so you could notice them since it sends so fast and then sending the report multiple times (3 times per line and 3 lines per report) since the copy seemed to be so poor. I also didn’t notice a large number of contest participants so after operating for a bit on went on to other things and popped back in every once in a while to see if there was anyone new to try and contact. I ended up with 25 contacts on 20m, 14 contacts on 40m and 9 contacts on 80m. Total multipliers was 26 across the 3 bands for a final score of 3.120 points.

In non-contest activities, I’ve had a bunch of US contacts related to the LoTW triple play award. Even though I don’t yet do CW, I’d like to get all 50 states on digital and phone and maybe before the end of the year I’ll be CW-ing and can concentrate on that. The past few days, besides the contest and the US contacts, I made 10 DX contacts including another contact with Victoria (VP8YLG) this time on 20m, DR09ANT special event station in Germany, 9A2009OS special event station in Croatia, Bosnia on 80m, a strong station in Austria and a new DXCC logged with J79WWW in Dominica.

In the afternoon on Sunday, I was tuning through a 20m frequency when I heard someone asking if the frequency was in use. I stayed on the frequency and when he called CQ I came back to him. The operator was ND0C (Randy) from Minnesota and he was running 3 watts (!!) in a QRP contest. I was amazed as he was blasting in as if he was on a local repeater. I spotted him on the cluster (wrong freq the first time but then I corrected it) and stayed on frequency a while to listen. Fantastic job Randy!

73,
K2DSL