This weekend was supposed to be the Sept ARRL VHF contest with my local club where we head up to a mountain top, set up a couple of towers with VHF (440/220/144 & 6m) antennas and operate, but the weather forecast was bad so it was cancelled. A good thing it was cancelled as Saturday was nasty with intermittent downpours, high winds, tornado warnings and 2 confirmed tornado touchdowns in NYC.  I didn’t even operate on Saturday in the WAE contest after a morning of activities and then the bad weather.

The WAE contests are interesting in that they add QTCs into the mix. A QTC is when you send up to 10 previous contacts you made to the other station. The info includes the time of the contact, the callsign of the station and the exchange the station gave you. For points, it’s the same as making a contact, so if you make 10 actual QSOs and on the 11th QSO you send them 10 QTCs, you have logged 21 points. In the SSB contest, I can only make a contact with European stations and I am the one to send them the QTCs (WAE RTTY contest has different rules).

Friday night I made a dozen contacts on 20m and 40m all with stations having nice strong signals. Saturday was a washout with the horrible weather so no contacts were made.

Sunday morning was beautiful and no indication of how bad the weather was the previous day with the exception of my fan dipole having the 20m and 15m legs wrapped around each other. I went out, lowered one end of the antenna, untangled the wires and hoisted it back up. I spent time on and off throughout the day making contacts with a lot of activity on 15m.

European ops were very aggressive asking for QTCs which was great. Even if I didn’t have a full set of 10 to send they wanted what I had. I very rarely got to more then 10 without an op asking for QTCs. 10m had some short openings but nothing too long. I checked often to see if anyone was calling CQ.

Late in the day activity moved to 20m and other then a couple at the end on 40m the activity was on 20m. I ended up with just a couple QTCs I could have given out so I essentially doubled my points by sending almost all my QSOs as QTCs. A fun twist to the standard exchange. I’m not sure why so many non-EU ops said “No QTCs” unless they were fresh out or just not comfortable sending them. I never turned down a request.

Here’s my score summary from N1MM:

 Band  Q/QTC  QSOs   Mlt
    7    QSO    11    18
   14    QSO    60    46
   14   SQTC    50     0
   21    QSO    53    46
   21   SQTC    65     0
   28    QSO     4     8
   28   SQTC     3     0
Total    All   246   118

Score : 29,028

Here’s a map of the contacts made using ADIF2Map (click for a larger view):

Now to see if I can get Swains Island – NH8S…

73,
K2DSL

Friday into Saturday was the 24 hour Russian RTTY contest. Had a few things to deal with over the weekend and thought I’d just get on to give out a couple of quick points. I participated a bit more than that.

Got on to make a couple contacts starting out with K1SFA @ K1TTT who I quickly found on 40m. Made another half dozen on 40m before checking 20 which had some activity. Worked 15 or so stations and checked 15m. AL9A was booming in on 15m and then I worked another US station but didn’t hear anything else. Went back to 20m and worked some more before heading back to 40m. Worked some there and came across TA2ZF in Turkey who was pretty loud. He wasn’t spotted yet from what I could tell but there were louder stations then me working him. I came back in a few more mins, could still work hear him and worked my first TA on 40m. I worked a couple more on 40m and 20m before checking 15m before calling it a night and came across BA2IA in China. He was up and down but I could get a good copy on him. Took a couple mins but I did work him for my first China contact in the log! I then called it a night.

Sat morning I got on to see what I could hear and with the radio still on 15m I heard ZC4LI (UK Base on Cyprus). Steve is an active contestor who I worked a few times in 2008 and 2009 but hadn’t worked much since (one in 2010 and twice in 2011). It was nice to work him for the first time in 2012. 10m was open to Europe – worked Germany, Serbia, Romania and Hungary. Bands seemed to drop out shortly after that and then were less active whenever I was able to hop on for a bit and check.

I received a nice TNX LOUD AS ALWAYS exchange from DO4DXA. I worked TA2ZF in Turkey again on 20m mid-day Sat and heard him continuously through the contest.

Midday on Saturday I worked TG9 and KH7 on 10m both with strong signals.

I loaded the logs from N1MM into DXKeeper, uploaded the QSOs to LoTW and eQSL as well as sent it in to the contest sponsor. This morning when I looked, the contact with China is already confirmed on LoTW for a new one.

Here’s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  DXC   OBL
    7      13     80    4     2
   14      72    585   29     7
   21      59    500   28     2
   28       9     85    7     0
Total     153   1250   68    11

Score : 98,750

Here’s a map of the contacts made (using ADIF2Map) – click to enlarge:

73,
K2DSL

Saturday into Sunday morning was the 2012 SCC RTTY ham radio contest. I had a lot of errands to get done on Saturday morning and a big party to go to Saturday evening, so my time to participate would be limited to just Saturday afternoon.

The exchange and multiplier for this contest is the year you were first licensed. For me that was 2007. Most seemed to be in the ballpark but one exchange was 1916 which required me to forcefully log the station when I worked them because N1MM said it wasn’t valid. I just checked the call now and it is for W7DK which is a club station that appears founded in 1916. Before I checked QRZ I was calculating the age of the person, assuming it was their birth year vs their license year and that would have made them 96 yrs old!

I spent most of my time on 20m and the rest on 15m though I checked 10m a lot. I would say at times 10m was open but no one was there calling CQ. During the contest I worked C31PP on 10m in Andorra for a new band with that country. The station wasn’t in the contest so I logged them in DXKeeper instead of N1MM. I also eeked out a 10m contact with K1SFA who was operating at the K1TTT station. I just saw K1SFA post her score which is almost 60% higher then last years #1 world score in the contest – congrats Khrystyne and team!

I didn’t work anything exotic in the short time I was on. I did hear India but there was a good pile-up and it wasn’t worth my time to try. I didn’t work a station that sent 2012 meaning they were licensed in the last 8 months. I did work 2 different EU stations sending 2011. Leaving out the 1916 station, the lowest year I received was 1950 by a Slovenia station. Both the average and median of all the years (excluding 1916) was 1982.

Here’s the N1MM score summary:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Year
    7       6     13    6
   14      64    166   40
   21      33     82   27
   28       6     14    6
Total     109    275   79

Score : 21,725

Here’s a map of the contacts generated from ADIF2Map (click for a larger view):

All logs are uploaded and submitted.

73,
K2DSL

I’m a little late getting to this post but it’s been a busy week.  Last weekend were a couple of smaller contests that I got some time in.

The NJ QSO Party is a state QSO party that never seems to attract much attention.  I was often away on the weekend it was running, but this time I’d be home, at least for some of it. I was away until late on Saturday and after I got home I went on 40m to see what was happening. I spun the dial and worked a few stations that were on and called CQ a bit but not much activity. The next day I did the same on 40m and it felt like there was even less. I recorded a CQ NJQP message and configured N1MM to send it through my SignaLink as a voice keyer, which worked great. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much activity, and I got tired of listening to myself call CQ.

I ended up with a whopping 28 Qs. I only worked 6 different NJ counties and didn’t even work my own county. At least I can say I participated.

 Band QSOs Pts Sec
    7   28  28  17
Total   28  28  17

Score : 476

A bit more action was going on in the RSGB IOTA contest. I ended up with much less time in this and more QSOs. Some were US but a bunch were DX including an “easy” contact with Turkey. I stayed on 20m and didn’t even check 15m at all. Below is the N1MM summary.

 Band QSOs Pts IOTA
   14 38   349  17
Total 38   349  17

Score : 5,933

Not sure how much time I’ll get on the radio for the next couple weeks. I’ll miss the NAQP SSB contest on the 18th & the SARTG RTTY contest  also that weekend. Before we know it, it’s September!

73 and good DX!
K2DSL

The July NAQP RTTY ham radio contest was Saturday. Format is a 12 hour contest that a single operator can work 10 total hours in. The exchange is consistent giving Name and State (or Canadian Province). I worked, as I have done in past NAQP contests, the names Dopey and Bambi during this contest.

I reviewed the NAQP July posting from last year that I wrote and recall that the first hour was slow and I might want to consider delaying the start and working a bit later into the evening.  So I started about 40 mins after the official start of the contest. I was hoping 15m and 10m would provide some activity but they were pretty quiet with little activity. I spent the first part on 20m and switching back to 15m & 10m hoping for conditions/activity to improve, but instead conditions seemed to get worse. So with around 77 Qs in the log, I decided to burn a 30 min break and see if things would improve.

After taking a 30 min break (the minimum time allowed between contacts to not count as operating time), I came back and things did seem to improve a little with my first contact after the break being KL7RA in Alaska on 15m. At least they didn’t get worse. With my delayed start and the 30 min break, I could work up through 15 mins before the end of the contest.

Before the contest on the RTTY reflector (mailing list) there was a posting about special event station VE7TUB being in the contest. I found and worked them on 20m.

Conditions were challenging for me throughout the entire contest. 20m became wall to wall with it being the only band seeing much activity, at least as far as I was concerned. Stations that were strong on 20m telling me they were also listening (QRV) at a specific 15m frequency resulting in no signal being heard.

There was also the DMC  RTTY contest going on at the same time so there were different stations calling CQ for different contests. Most of the DX stations calling CQ were in the DMC contest, but I did have some DX stations come back to me and send both a serial number (DMC) and their name (NAQP) in their exchange. It’s always nice when you are running 100w into a dipole and Greece, Slovenia & Czech stations call you.

I switched to 40m just after 0000z (8pm ET) and there was a fair amount of activity already on the band. I guess with 15m not cooperating, you need to move somewhere and 40m is where folks went. The bands weren’t noisy and I didn’t notice any local noise so that wasn’t an issue. I popped back onto 20m from time to time the remainder of the evening to see if any new stations showed up to work. I hit 80m just before 0300z (11pm ET) where at the time I had no 1 call area stations in the log. Noise wasn’t too bad on 80m either.

I surpassed last years score at 0439z (12:39am) with KH6ZM on 40m. 338 Qs this year vs 366 last year made possible by more multipliers – 121 vs 111 at the same score from 2011. I had 1 hour to go when I passed last years score. The last hour was tough as it was getting late and folks were dropping off, even if they were working the entire 10 hours. The last 15 mins of my time I found very little to work and calling CQ resulted in very little activity. Next year, it makes sense to wait 30 mins after the start, but maybe not take a 30 min break, even if conditions seem poor. The last 30 mins of the contest (0530z – 0600z) are pretty dead and not worth holding out for any activity there. Maybe different if you are working 80m on the West Coast.

I finished up with 367 Qs in the log but one was a dup that called me so I have 366 Qs with points which exactly matches last years QSO count. I ended up with 126 multipliers this year vs 111 last year which results in a score increase of 5,490 points on the same number of contacts logged. I worked 45 of the 50 States and 7 of the 13 Canadian Provinces.

Here’s the score summary from N1MM:

My log has been submitted to the contest, eQSL & LoTW.

Good DX,
K2DSL

Saturday morning started the 24 hour DLDX RTTY ham radio contest. I was able to participate in this after a couple months of a lot of non-ham radio activities and I was glad to hear the diddles in the headset. DX contacts are worth more than US contacts (3 times a US contact) and logging a station in Germany is worth the most (4 times a US contact).

Started out at the start of the contest (7am ET) and there wasn’t a whole lot of activity. Bands were on the crummy side and just 20m had any signals. It didn’t improve too much for me until the afternoon where 15m had a bit more activity. I checked 10m a few times and heard very little activity. I worked a couple TN stations and one in OH on 10m and that was it.

During the day I took a bunch of breaks and did some other errands and early in the evening I needed to head out for a couple hours. Otherwise, I would pop onto the radio, call CQ or S&P a bit and then take a break. Late in the evening I moved to 40m which was ok but found only 1 station on 80m. I don’t know if folks moved there much later in the evening but I called it quits before before 11:30pm.

An interesting note about this contest are the varied categories you can operate under. Besides the standard single-op/multi-op and low/high power categories, you can operate 6 hours or 24 hours and even a dipole/ground plane only category. Since I only have wire antennas, I qualify for the dipole category.

Here’s a map of the contacts run through Adif To Map (click map for a larger view):

and here’s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  DXCC  Area
  3.5       1      5     1     1
    7      21    145     4    12
   14     167   1365    26    14
   21      37    230     6     9
   28       3     15     1     2
Total     229   1760    38    38

Score : 133,760

All contacts loaded in eQSL, LoTW and my log sent in.

73 and good DX,
K2DSL

I had a little time on July 1st to hook up the antennas and turn on the ham radio. The annual RAC Canada Day contest was underway and I figured I’d try and make a few contacts. Most activity was on 20m with a few stations calling on 40m. 15m and 10m were dead whenever I checked. I did make a single contact on 15m but it was a US station. Otherwise, I didn’t hear anyone on 15 or 10 and checked a few times while I was on the air.

I spent most of my time just tuning up and down 20m SSB looking for new stations. As I was tuning I heard 1A0C calling CQ on 20m. He must have just QSYed as there was no one coming back to him. I tuned up 5, put out my call and worked him right away for a new DXCC entity – Sov. Mil. Order of Malta. Not a hard contact from the east coast but good to ham them in the log.

Some booming thunderstorms rolled in late in the afternoon so I shut things down and unplugged the antennas for the remainder of the day. I ended up with 43 total Qs with most on 20m.

Thanks for the contacts and maybe I can get some RTTY contesting in this weekend in the upcoming DL-DX RTTY contest.

73,
K2DSL

My older daughter graduated high school this Friday and the weekend was already booked with non-stop activities, so it didn’t leave much of any time at all for operating Field Day.

Since I was licensed, I operated Field Day with my club using K2BAR as our club call. This weekend didn’t allow me any time to help them with setting up, making it over to our site to operate, or to assist with tear down at the end of the event. I haven’t spoken with anyone to see how things went or how conditions were but I should get some info this week.

On Saturday afternoon I operated for a very short time (60-90 mins in total) from home and make 46 contacts. My main purpose was to find my club and work them, which I did but just on 1 band. That is better than nothing but I would have liked to get them on more bands. I worked a few different state/sections on a few different bands. When I was on 15 and 10m they were pretty dead though I worked IL, KS & Puerto Rico on 10m. I will be interested to see the breakdown of contacts by band for the club.

My younger daughter graduates high school next year, though I’m not sure yet if it will fall on Field Day weekend or not.  As the guys in the club told me, they only graduate high school once and there will be plenty of other field days.

73,
K2DSL

Friday night at 8pm local / 0000z started this years CQ WPX SSB contest on the ham bands. After last weeks lackluster band conditions in the BARTG RTTY contest, I wasn’t optimistic about what the weekend would bring, but things were much improved in just 7 days. I decided to run assisted in this contest using the DX packet cluster to fill the band map with spotted stations. I also configured N1MM to automatically spot any station I worked that wasn’t already on the band map. That resulted in 312 spots of other stations by me over the course of the weekend, based on DXSummit’s spot search.

Friday:
I started out Friday evening after a long week at work and the bands seemed ok. I was on 20m and after just 15 mins came across JT5DX in Mongolia and worked him quickly. I have worked JT5DX before and is my the only station I’ve logged from there. I worked a couple Alaska stations, WA5ZUP as I do in every contest, and Caribbean stations along with a lot of US stations. Scattered in the mix were European stations. For the first 2 hours I switched between 20m and 15m just scanning the band and working whoever I heard. After 2 hours I switched to 40m, worked just 3 contacts, and called it a night with 75 Qs in the log.

Saturday:
Sat morning with the radio on 40m from the evening before I scanned and worked a half dozen US stations before switching to 20m. I worked some stations on 20m and switched to 15m and scanned and worked the stations there. On 20m I heard 2 loud stations in China but couldn’t break through the pileup. Still don’t have a China station in the log. 10m and 15m were much improved over last weekend. 15m was more enjoyable than 20m with a bit more space between stations. I worked on and off most of the day with occasional breaks.

Watching the cluster as I was turning the dial 15m I saw a spot come in for N2RJ on 40m. N2RJ, Ryan, is located about 30 miles from me. We’ve connected on the computer via a common co-worker we both used to work with. I had not spoken with Ryan on the air before. He had a mini pileup going and I could hear him ok but it took a few attempts for him to hear me. He said hello and I wished him good luck. I saw him spotted on 20m or 15m on Sunday but couldn’t hear him to work him on another band. Just after 8pm ET/0000z, I came across A73A in Qatar calling CQ on 20m and was able to work him before a pileup came, likely from my auto spot after logging him. This was my first contact with Qatar.  I continued throughout the evening where 20m was active for most of it and 40m had some good activity. Nothing much was happening on 80m whenever I checked and worked just a handful of stations there. I called it quits before midnight and ended up with 452 Qs at the end of the night.

Sunday:
Sunday is usually less productive and more searching than pouncing as all the “easy” stations have already been worked. But there’s always new stations to catch on new bands and new folks that are popping in as well as smaller pileups on some of the harder stations for me to work. And of course, band conditions are constantly changing so you never know what’s in store for you. I worked a few stations again on 40m before switching to 20m and came up a VK4 station in Australia that I worked after a few tries. Later in the day I worked a different VK4 station on 15m which was the first logged VK station on 15m and it’s already confirmed on LoTW. I had logged 10m/20m/40m contacts with Australia but missed 15m until this weekend.

I spent most of the day just dialing around 10m, 15m & 20m scanning the bands from top to bottom and working whoever I could hear. Usually if I heard them, they could hear me. If for some reason I wasn’t getting through, I’d tune a bit off frequency and see if that helped. If not, I’d tune away and come back a few mins later, usually getting them on the first or second call. I really enjoy 10m when there’s activity since contacts seem so easy when the band is open vs 20m and even 15m. In the afternoon I started to watch my QSO count as I approached last years total of 567 Qs. When I hit that number around 1740z I noticed that for the same QSO count as last year I actually had less QSO points but 27 more WPX prefixes and a score about 10k more. I took a break for a bit after hitting that number.

As I could smell dinner cooking, 15m started to come alive with the JAs and the VK4 I worked and I was hoping dinner wouldn’t be ready for a little while as they started to peak. I don’t recall JAs being as loud as they were on Sunday so it was nice to work 9 of them, fighting over the west coast stations, before the dinner bell rang. It was a good dinner but I got back on with a little time left and scanned all the bands working as many stations up to the final bell as I could. I finished with 657 Qs in the log which is 90 more than last year and 183,310 more points.

Score Summary:
Here’s my score summary from N1MM. 40m and 80m were light and contacts on those bands are worth more points, but it just wasn’t as productive (or fun) for me to  hang out there and try and beat the conditions.

 Band    QSOs    Pts   WPX
  3.5      15     27     7
    7      62    155    34
   14     239    536   172
   21     241    617   148
   28     100    251    61
Total     657   1586   422

Score : 669,292

Map:
Here’s a map of the contacts made with http://levinecentral.com/adif2map (click to enlarge):

Random stats:
DXCCs logged: 88
Most logged DXCC: US followed by Brazil than Canada
Most WPXs by entity: US followed by Brazil than Argentina
CQ Zones logged: 27 out of 40 zones
Calls worked on 4 bands: 7  – only 1 was a US station
Unique stations logged: 496

Thanks to all those great ops that pulled my 100w signal out of the noise and put me in their log. Hopefully I didn’t blow too many exchanges and I’m in all those DX stations logs.

73,
K2DSL

Without too many time consuming obligations this past weekend I could participate a fair amount in the BARTG HF RTTY contest. I had high hopes, but in a nutshell, conditions seemed to stink. Bands were poor for me with weak to no signals on 15m and 10m. Not sure why, but seems it wasn’t just me with post contest reports talking about lousy band conditions. But, we make do with what we have and like most things in life, any time on the radio is better than time at work – at least for folks where every day isn’t Saturday.

Friday night my local club the Bergen Amateur Radio Assoc (BARA)  had a VE testing session. We had 19 individuals, 17 of which walked out with a new license or upgrade including 4 new Extras. 8 of those were brand new hams, some of which walked away with their General class license. I was home before the contest started so I had time to setup N1MM with the appropriate macros for an exchange that includes RST (599), serial number and the current time in UTC. It’s a bit of a long exchange and I’d like to see 599 removed, but we all have to send the same thing.

Friday evening after the VE test session I got on the air for a bit. I made some 40m/20m contacts for a short time but things were kind of quiet. Checked 80m but heard no signals at all before turning off the radio. Ended Fri night with just 39 contacts and was hopeful I’d hear more signals the following day.

Saturday didn’t prove to be better than Friday night. I wasn’t hearing many European stations and signals were weak when I heard anyone. 20m had the majority of the activity and 15m was quiet with 10m dead. It was taking me back over a year to before the current sunspot cycle started and you spent all your time on 20m. But even 20m wasn’t great. I checked 15m and 10m often but there just wasn’t a lot of activity. I did catch a New Zealand station which was loud on 10m and he seemed to be loud for a while. Otherwise, 10m was useless the entire weekend with just 12 total Qs. It was well after dark before 40m activity picked up and it was ok, though mostly US stations. I even worked a few 80m stations, but there wasn’t a real lot of activity there either. Ended up with just 205 Qs in the log at the end of Saturday.

Sunday conditions certainly didn’t start out better. 15m and 10m were again pretty unproductive with most activity on 20m. I worked 2 stations on Sunday that I had worked on Saturday and I’d consider them dups. What was odd was their serial number which is part of the exchange was lower on Sunday than on Saturday. I’d have to guess maybe they had a computer/logging issue and had to start over. I worked the contest on and off throughout the day/evening taking breaks and running errands. I did a bit more CQing on Sunday on 20m and 40m. Had some luck, especially when I was spotted by some ops which helped. I usually spot stations myself if they aren’t already on the band map, assuming I’m using the cluster. It’s always nice when I’m using the cluster to see someone else spot me. I closed the contest out on 40m though I checked 80m and didn’t hear anything Sunday evening.

In the end, I finished up with  377 contacts with a few dups on top of that. I did work all 6 continents with just 37 DXCCs including the US and Canada. There were 272 distinct calls logged and only 3 calls worked on 4 bands with no calls worked on all 5 bands.

Here”s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts   DX  Areas   Con
  3.5      14     14    2      7     0
    7     105    105   14     17     3
   14     194    194   29     17     1
   21      52     52   13     11     2
   28      12     12    6      6     0
Total     377    377   64     58     6

Score : 275,964

Here’s a map generated from http://levinecentral.com/adif2map (click to enlarge):

Thanks to everyone for the contacts!
K2DSL