Category Archives: Contests

Christmas & RAC Winter Contest

Contests, Misc

For Christmas I got a fleece pullover and a long sleeve t-shirt with my call sign and name on it from CallsignWear. Nice quality clothing and the personalization looks sharp.  My younger daughter did the tags for the call sign personalized items and one said “To Kilo 2 Delta Sierra Lima Love L5PDL, S9LIZ and M2Mer” . Very cute.

On Fri night, Saturday I participated in the RAC (Radio Amateurs of Canada) Winter Contest. I have just gotten a good (bad) cold and wasn’t feeling well, but I made 88 contacts on 80, 40 and 20, mostly to Canadian stations, though you’re allowed to work anyone. Sort of like a QSO party where you can still work other “states” but the big points are making a QSO with a Canadian station.

        Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec
         3.5      41     410    9
           7      16     162    6
          14      31     212    7
       Total      88     784   22

       Score : 17,248

There wasn’t a tremendous amount of operators on, probably because it’s right after Christmas. I thought there would have been more Canadian stations.

Happy Holidays!
K2DSL

OK DX RTTY Contest

Contests

Still having antenna issues, and I had a bunch of things to do on Saturday, but I was able to put in a couple hours to participate in the OK DX RTTY contest.  The antenna is acting up and I can’t tune well (so not full power) but I ended up with 93 QSOs with 54 within in the US, 7 in Canada and 32 DX. Here’s the breakdown by band.

Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty   Sec
3.5      17      57    4    1
7        33     117    7    2
14       43      57    8    5
Total    93     231   19    8

Score : 6,237

Happy Holidays,
K2DSL

Antenna update and 10m contest

Antennas, Contests

I’m still having an issue with my G5RV as mentioned in my last post. I lowered the antenna today, pulled the coax back out and did a continuity test from pin to end and shield to end and it seemed all good. So I raised it back up and what do you know – I could tune on 80, 40, 20 and 10 again. Odd. I make a few 10m contacts and then see an interesting 20m station show up in the cluster so I tune to it and uh-oh, not again. Seems like I can’t tune 20m again. Ugh. Nothing changed in that short time other then a very slight breeze out today.

So I call a local club member that has an antenna analyzer and he calls me back later in the day and I run over and grab it. I connect the coax and 20m looks good with a low SWR and 50 ohm impedance. Well I disconnect the coax and connect it to the radio and it won’t tune. Hmmm – now it seems it’s the radio. I disconnect the coax, connect it to the analyzer and 20m is showing  a 3+ SWR and impedance of 15-20 ohms. What the heck? I wiggle the cable/coax but all looks tight and solid. I take some more readings and note them down and send off an email to the very helpful individual I got it from 6 months ago.

After dinner, I decide to take it down and throw up my basic 20m dipole I have and it is working fine. We’ll see how this all ends in the upcoming weeks.

For a very short time after dealing with the antenna this morning and it apparently working until I realized it wasn’t, I made a few contacts during the ARRL 10m contest. Only 21 contacts but before this contest, I only had 3 10m contacts logged. It’s interesting to see who I was able to hear/contact. The screen shot snippet below of the 21 contacts makes the “openings” pretty obvious.

I’m where the cross hairs are in NJ. That line of contacts across FL looks fake, but those pins are shown based on the grid location of the operator from QRZ. Here’s a close up of just FL.

Hopefully we can get my G5RV antenna straightened out soon.

73,
K2DSL

Antenna issue and SARTG Results

Antennas, Contests

First the not so good news. This past weekend was a RTTY contest and things were fine. The beginning of the week I fired up the radio and I can’t seem to get the SWR within range when tuning. Hadn’t been a problem before on 10, 20, 40 or 80 meters. I contacted the fellow I got it from and he suggested some tests and resetting my radio. Reset the radio and there’s no difference there. Ran a couple tests and sent him the results. I think I need to pull it down this weekend and see what is going on with it.

Back in August I went to my in-laws and operated as K2DSL/4 from North Carolina for the SARTG RTTY contest. The final results are posted and I placed 55th in the Single Op Single Band 20m category. Looking back at that contest, I could only operate 2/3rds of it because I was travelling back home for one of the time slots. I also wasn’t comfortable using MMTTY yet which would help me now compared to using DM780 during a contest.  Comparing my submitted score to the final results, I submitted 106 QSOs and they show 103. I submitted 39 mults and the final results show 38.  So comparing the final score that I submitted, I went from 45,825 down to 43,320.  Still, it was my real first contest on my own and it was a lot of fun.

73,
K2DSL

TARA RTTY Melee Contest

Contacts, Contests

Friday night into Saturday was the 24 hour TARA RTTY Melee where you can operate only 16 hours. Not sure how many hours I ended up operating but it was a couple before heading to bed and then a good portion of the day on Saturday with about 6 or so short errands around town.

I ended up with 199 contacts across 75m, 40m and 20m. Most were US with about a dozen Canadian stations and about a dozen DX stations.  199 QSOs with 66 multipliers for a score of 13,134.

Next big RTTY contest is just after the beginning of the year. I think I’ll be home from a skiing trip by then. Should be a lot of fun.

See you on the air,
K2DSL

ARRL Sweepstakes Phone Contest

Contacts, Contests

This past weekend was the ARRL Sweepstakes Phone Contest. I couldn’t dedicate a large portion of the weekend to the contest with obligations on Saturday and the Giants football game from 10am-6pm on Sunday. So during the time I could get on the radio, I had a lot of fun.

Band   QSOs  Pts   Sec
3.5    103   206   29
7       62   124   19
14      40    80   19
Total: 205   410   67
Score : 27,470

I had 2 phone contacts with Alaska and I logged contacts with 47 of the 50 states, just missing Kentucky, South Carolina and Oklahoma.  As the stats above show, I logged a contact with 67 of the 80 sections. One frustrating missing section was Southern NJ. A whopping 50 miles or so south of me I couldn’t make a contact on 20, 40 or 80 meters.  if I was around when 20m was open to the West Coast I probably could have gotten some of the missing sections in the US and in Canada.

What was nice, even though I’ve only just started contesting, is there were a couple of operators that recognized my call and said hello when we were making the exchange.  Comments like “Nice to speak with you on phone, hope to see you in the next RTTY contest.”.

I’m going to take the Extra Class test on Friday. Would have been nice to have been an Extra during the contest so I could have slipped down into the Extra portion of the bands for additional sections (multipliers) and QSOs.  But a lot of fun for a phone contest. I found it a bit more enjoyable and relaxing then one where your contacts are all international.

73,
K2DSL

WAE RTTY Contest

Contacts, Contests

This past weekend was the WAE RTTY contest. Since Daylight Savings Time ended here, 0000z is 1 hour earlier. The contest started at 7pm ET Friday night and ended 7pm ET Sunday evening. I was able to spend a good amount of waking time working the contest. I didn’t stay up later then I would have to put in extra hours. I’ll need to check what N1MM reports but I think I put in maybe 4 hours Friday and then 12-14 each day on Saturday and Sunday.

This was the first time I used QTCs and it was interesting. QTCs are more about the score and not about the contacts so I didn’t push hard asking to send/receive them. I asked a few times and whenever someone asked me, as long as I was getting a good copy on them, I took them. Probably easier to send then receive, but I’m sure I’m a weaker signal to them then they are to me. But next time, I’ll push QTCs more.

My summary looks like 420 contacts in total with 173,888 points. Remember last nights quick analysis, it consisted of 50 DXCC entities, 3 of which are the US, Alaska and Hawaii. I like the ability to make US contacts and not just international ones. Makes for more action for us little guys. I think there were 2 new DXCCs out of those 50 which were Greenland and Gabon in Africa. In a quick review once I imported the log and ran it against QRZ, it looks like I made contacts in 41 of the 50 states.

A lot of the contacts were ones I made previously. If I knock those out and all the US/Canada QSOs, there’s less then 75 new contacts in my log. I’ll go through this week and see which I might send a paper QSL card to. LOTW and eQSL were already updated. LOTW now shows me with 2,821 records uploaded and it’s jumped to over 1,007 confirmed QSLs, which should rise further over the next week as folks submit their logs to LOTW. The RTTY contesters are the best at sending to LOTW. I looked and I’m not showing any new DXCCs confirmed in LOTW yet so it is still showing 65. Maybe some of the contacts in DXCCs that previously didn’t upload their logs will do so, so even though I only contacted 2 new DXCCs, there could be contacts with ops in DXCCs that I previously contacted but don’t have confirmed yet on LOTW.

So tonight when I get home from work I’ll mess around with the data and run some reports against the data to see how things are shaking out. RTTY is so much fun!!

73,
K2DSL

CQ WW SSB

Antennas, Contacts, Contests, Equipment

This was my first CQ WW SSB contest. It turned out to be a very different experience then other contests I’ve participated in so far. First, the digital contests seem to be much easier to work and make contacts. That could be because there’s less people participating as well as that a digital contact is easier then a phone (voice) contact. The second reason is that with 100w and a dipole, you aren’t busting through any pileups. But overall, I’m happy with how things turned out. In this contest, other then to add a new multiplier, all contacts had to be DX so I there was no US-to-US contacts on then to grab a multiplier.

I ended up over the 2 days with 158 contacts. Almost all except 8 were on 20 meters with the 8 being on 40 meters. I ended up, combined with the bands, 84 countries and 25 zones with a combined score of 46,523 points. There were 11 new DXCC entities in my logbook at the end of the contest.

I was able to make my first voice contact with Alaska after a few previous RTTY contacts so that was neat. Other then Japan and countries like China and others in that area along with Austrailia, I think I was able to make a contact with all the countries I saw spotted on the band. I could actually hear Japan fairly strong but they couldn’t hear me. It wasn’t because of a pileup either as 2 strong stations were calling CQ over and over and just not able to hear me. Oh well, maybe next time.

I used my Heil Proset 5 for the first time and it worked extremely well. Even though it is light, it does make your neck a bit tired and your ears a bit sore, but taking just a min break every once in a while helps. So it was a good purchase to add to my equipment. I didn’t use the new voice keyer I purchased yet. I’ll save that for a rainy day.

There seemed to be a fair amount of activity on 15 meters but I couldn’t tune up the G5RV antenna with the Kenwood TS-2000 to put out a full 100 watts. I’d guess an external antenna tuner might do better then the internal tuner or of course a more appropriate 15m antenna would work. I’ll ponder what to do about that one.

When a new entity popped up on the band, if you weren’t quick enough, a big pileup started. For me, the most effective way is to either wait until there’s a pause after most stations put out their call and before the CQing op came back, or to just come back later. I think in almost all cases, I was able to make the contact.

I also noticed there’s a much less percentage of SSB folks which are using LOTW then RTTY folks. Within a day or two of a RTTY contest, a significant number of operators have uploaded their logs. Comparing that to this SSB contest almost a week later only 19 of the 158 contacts are confirmed on LOTW. I really wish folks used that more. I know I’d have DXCC confirmed since I have around 112 DXCC entities contacted in my log book.

So that’s my summary of my first CQ WW SSB contest. All fun!

73,
K2DSL

WAS Awards Arrive

Contacts, Contests

Came home yesterday to a large envelope from the ARRL. Inside are 2 shiny new certificates for Worked All States.

WAS #53,075 and WAS RTTY #634

I’ll have to go out and get some frames for these 2 and the certificate I received as being part of the club team in my first contest back in Sept 2007. We were 7th place in the US/Canada and 1st place in the Eastern NY Section for the 2007 September VHFQSO Party.

73,

K2DSL

JARTS RTTY Contest

Contacts, Contests

This past weekend was the JARTS RTTY contest.  I wasn’t able to spend a full 48 hours on the air, but I could put in a few hours Friday night (EDT), a good amount on Saturday, and a couple hours at the end of the contest on Sunday in the late afternoon/early evening.

I ended up with 385 QSOs and 90,597 points. Nothing has popped up yet as odd with any of the QSOs so I’ll wait a few more days and submit in the log.

The highlights from this contest were two more contacts with Alaska, 3 more contacts with Japan stations, a few southern Africa stations and the big one being 3B8GT in Mauritius which is an island off the east coast of Africa. That contact is the farthest I’ve made so far at about 9,300 miles. He was calling CQ and I got through on the first try. Amazing!!

On the local front, I was able to make contacts with operators in all the outstanding states other then Wyoming. All those ops have already uploaded their logs to LOTW so they are confirmed. That leaves me with Wyoming as the only outstanding WAS/WAS RTTY state I need. Today I emailed 2 operators in Wyoming which seem to be into digital and LOTW. We’ll see how that pans out.

I’m very happy with how this contest went for me.  I want to work on tweaking the radio a bit to help in filtering out stations above/below the one I’m trying to tune in.

73,
K2DSL