This past weekend was the annual WAE SSB contest here non-EU stations can only work EU stations.

The WAE contests support QTCs which is an exchange of up to 10 other contacts (time, call and serial number) that were made. Each previous contact can only be sent once and a max of 10 QTCs can be sent to any station during the contest. QTCs add points but not multipliers and its a quick way to potentially double the number of points made.

An example exchange might be me working a DL9ZZ station and then he asking if I have QTCs…

K2DSL K2DSL
K2DSL TU 59 456
DL9ZZ TU 59 123
QSL DO YOU HAVE QTCS FOR ME?
YES – BATCH 9/10
0823 DL1AA 100
0823 DL2HQ 233
0825 9A2EU 76
…
0840 GW4BLE 433
K2DSL QSL BATCH 9/10 TU 73

I made the QSO with DL9ZZ which is a point and possible mult and then I get 10 more points for the QTCs exchanged.

I worked a little while on Friday evening when the contest started but most of the contacts were made on Saturday starting later in the morning. Most activity was on 15m & 20m as you can see from the summary below. It’s pretty easy when you just leave your antenna pointed at Europe vs rotating it throughout the contest. For my 40m and 80m contacts it’s the wire that hangs between the trees in my yard – no rotation needed.

My local club was planning on a group VHF contest gathering but the weather was rainy on Saturday so we decided to cancel it. That gave me more time to work the WAE contest.

There was no shortage of stations that wanted QTCs and often I didn’t have a full bucket of 10 to send but they wanted what I had. If I sent them a partial number (less then 10) I might stop by if I heard them later and could send them more. I even came back to some loud stations where I previously made a QSO with but didn’t have any QTCs to send and just sent them QTCs when I had them available.

Sunday was a NY Giants NFL football home game and I was going with the family to it. I was gone most of the day (8+ hours) and after coming back home I got on and tried to make more contacts. I should have stayed home instead of going to the football game since I got sunburned and they played poorly and lost. I might have had more fun making contacts, though hanging out with the family was really enjoyable. Sunday late in the day with just a couple hours left, I was hearing lots of EU stations but I worked them already. I probably should have found a frequency on 20m and started calling CQ but by the time I got home from the game I was pretty beat so I just spun the dial.

I ended up giving out the same number of QTCs as QSOs that I made which is as optimal as you can get in this particular contest. No lack of folks that asked for them and wanted as many or as few as you could send.

Below is my score which shows the QSOs and QTCs per band.

 Band  QSOs  QTCs  Mults
-------------------------
   80:    1           4
   40:   16     6    21
   20:  105    98    58
   15:   96   115    48
   10:    1           2
-------------------------
Total:  219   219   133  
Total Score = 58,254

73,
K2DSL

As I was going to post about this weekend’s SCC RTTY contest I realized I hadn’t posted about the last contests I participated in which is now 2 weekends ago.  Well, here goes what happened back during the weekend of  Aug 16th & 17th…

Earlier in the week I brought my older daughter down to Clemson in SC to start her 3rd year there and now it was time to move my younger daughter into her NYC apartment before she gets started on her 2nd year at LIM College. So there really wasn’t a lot of time to get on the air but I managed to squeeze in some contacts in both the SARTG RTTY contest and the NAQP SSB contest.

In the SARTG contest I caught a little bit of the 1st of the 3 sessions over the course of the weekend. Missed all of the 2nd session. On Sunday morning 20m was active for the 3rd SARTG session. Happened to hear 2 loud JA stations while pointing to EU and worked them both before I spotted them on the cluster. Worked a bunch of JAs on 20m. 15 m was open at 8am ET / 1200z. I ended up working more JA mults then Canadian mults in the contest. With 135 Qs in the SARTG my wife and I headed back into NYC on Sunday to finish up getting her straightened out in her apartment.

N1MM score summary for the SARTG RTTY contest:

 Band QSOs Pts  Area DXCC
  3.5    4   35   1     4
    7   16  170   4     8
   14   81 1080  30    18
   21   34  470  23     4
Total  135 1755  58    34

Score : 161,460

The NAQP SSB was also that weekend with most of the activity taking place during the day or early evening on Saturday while I was in my daughters apartment putting Ikea furniture together until my fingers were bleeding!  When we got home late in the day I sat in the chair and worked as much as I could before I just needed to get some sleep. You can tell from the summary below that I was on 40m & 80m mostly vs any daytime activity that would have occurred more on 20m and 15m . But I made some contacts and can’t complain at all.

N1MM score summary for the NAQP SSB contest:

 Band QSOs Sec DX
  3.5   21  11  0
    7   69  26  0
   14   37  13  1
Total  127  50  1

Score : 6,477

Not bad with 262 contacts made in a weekend I didn’t think I’d even be able to turn on the radio. Daughter moved in, QSOs made, logs sent to all services/sponsors, and I’m a happy fellow! Apologies again for the late post.

73,

K2DSL

I was able to pop into the WAE CW contest over the weekend for a few hours each day. This contest allows a US station to only make contact with an European station to exchange a serial number. A twist in this contest is it also allows exchanging QTCs which is where we’d send a list of 10 contacts made – their time, call and serial number received from the other station. Each QTC equates to a “contact” from a points perspective so if you work 100 stations and make 100 actual QSOs, you can double the number of points by also sending 10 batches of 10 QSOs to 10 different stations you work. I’m not comfortable enough with CW to do QTCs so I declined. For CW, we’d send the info so it wouldn’t be that difficult so maybe next year I’ll consider sending CW QTCs. I have no issue with QTCs during the RTTY version of the contest where we can send and receive those with EU stations.

Friday night about 1 hour after the contest started I got on and made 24 contacts all on 20m in just over 30 mins. I had family in from out of town so I spent time with them vs being on the radio. I checked 15m but there were no stations heard.

Saturday morning I started out on 20m but there was little activity and I moved to 15m where I made most of the contacts until early afternoon when 15m seemed to fade and all activity was on 20m. Somewhere on Sat I got pulled along to a pet store to check out new kittens to adopt so there was some furry things in the house as our previously adopted cat of 14 yrs had recently passed away. I wrapped up my radio time for the day around 3:30pm ET (1930z) and headed off with the entire family to a pre-season NY Giants football game. My daughters both leave for college starting this week so it was nice all of us got out together. Finished up on Saturday with 104 Q’s with EU stations logged in N1MM.

Sunday morning I got on and made some contacts again on 15m before moving to 20m. My local radio club family picnic was today so I drove over to the park where it was being held. We had about 50 people there when I took a quick headcount. It looked like there was enough food for 200 people so no one was going to leave hungry. After a couple hours I headed back home to make a few more contacts and help around the house as my girls are getting ready to leave. I was surprised at the end end to see I was able to make an additional 101 contacts on Sunday for a total of 205 Qs with EU stations.

There were a few times during the contest that I followed or might have been followed by K2DSW, an operator in Iowa. With our calls being so similar it was interesting to hear the delay, or not, between various operators when I sent my call just after they logged a contact with K2DSW. Some times I’d hear a pause and sometimes the EU operator wouldn’t miss a beat. I contacted K2DSW after the contest and we had a great exchange which I’ll follow-up on in another post soon.

Below is the summary from N1MM and it shows that 20m was a better band for me over the weekend for the times I was able to be on the air.  If I had sent QTCs, I would have doubled the number of points though the multipliers would have been the same so my score essentially would have doubled.

 Band   Q/QTC  QSOs   Mult
   14    QSO   142      68
   21    QSO    63      40
Total    All   205     108

Score : 22,140

I heard a bunch of non-EU stations on CW while I was in the contest, but since we can only work EU stations, there was no reason to call them. I heard at least two different stations in Turkey that were loud as well as familiar calls for some familiar and always loud stations int the middle east.

73,
K2DSL

I’ll start with the TARA Grid contest since that was quick. I ended up making just 15 contacts against 14 grids. It didn’t seem like there was much activity or I wasn’t on or listening where everyone was. Maybe what didn’t help was the NAQP CW contest started up during the 24 hours of this one? Anyway, at least I got in a couple contacts.

Saturday was the NAQP CW contest and that had much more activity. I didn’t do well on 15m and nothing on 10m but 20m was fine making contacts across the country from the south to the west coast. I was on and off throughout the day but off for 2 hours during peak 40m/80m activity when I went into NYC to pick up one of my daughters from work. I got back on for a bit after I got home around 11:45pm ET (0345z) to log some 80m contacts. Looks like I worked 39 states in those 213 Qs.

Here’s my score as reported by N1MM and submitted to the contest, 3830, LoTW, eQSL, Club Log, QRZ, etc.

 Band    QSOs    Sec   Mult2
  3.5      26     15     0
    7      67     31     0
   14     105     30     1
   21      15     10     0
Total     213     86     1

Score : 18,531

The Mult2 above was a nice strong ZF station in the Cayman Islands.

During the contest I popped away twice to work two different Bolivia (CP) stations that I was alerted to being on the air. One CPstation was on SSB and the other on RTTY. Since I have been on HF I’ve only logged two CP stations before and then I go and log two in modes I didn’t have in the span of under 2 hours.

73,

K2DSL

Starting Saturday morning East Coast time in the US was the 24 hour IOTA contest where anyone can work anyone else, but it’s really best to work stations that have an IOTA associated with them as they are worth 15 pts vs 2 pts.  You can have an IOTA number if you’re on an island which might not seem as exotic as it might sound. Yes, there are islands such as Reunion Island or the South Cook Islands that come to mind, but Long Island counts as an island too.

The contest started out slow for me with few signals and those I heard were weak. I logged some Qs and then all of a sudden I could tell the noise was back that I experienced last week. I immediately got up and asked my neighbor if he just turned something on and he said he just opened the garage and put the lights on. I asked him to shut off the lights and the noise was gone – turn on the lights and the noise was back. They installed some high output T5 fluorescent lights in their new garage and they are noisy. With both on I get about a S5-S7 when I turn the antenna to them. With one disconnected as a test, the noise was 1/2 so it’s not one particular light that was the problem. We’ll have to figure out what to do but at least the source was identified.

I spent the day going back and forth to the radio working stations here and there. It remained pretty slow to mid afternoon when the signals got stronger and I could hear and contact more stations. It continued strong through the evening so I spent time at the radio. I worked SSB (phone) for most of the contest until I saw a station spotted on CW that I wanted to work so I did some CW too, putting me in the Low Power Single Operator Assisted Mixed Mode category. The spot I saw was for Dodecanese on 20m and I was able to work him.  I saw E51AND in South Cook Islands spotted on 20m at 10pm local time and it took me 2 straight hours to get him logged right at midnight local time. He had a huge pileup  but it started to thin out a bit as it got later in the evening.

After logging the E5-S station I took a quick listen and logged 2 ZLs and a VK station on 20m CW followed by FR4NT on Reunion Island who was coming in very strong on 20m SSB.  I was pretty tired so I exported my log from N1MM, loaded it into DXKeeper and sent it off to the contest robot, Clublog, eQSL and LoTW.  I already have the SV5 Dodecanese contact confirmed on LoTW.

It looks like I worked 46 different DXCCs including Dodecanese, South Cook Island, Reunion Island, Crete, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand & Australia.

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

 
Here’s my N1MM score summary:

 Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  IOTA
    7  CW       5     49     3
    7  LSB      2     30     2
   14  CW      23    241    13
   14  USB     86    807    29
   21  USB      6     77     4
Total  Both   122   1204    51

Score : 61,404

73 & Good DX,

K2DSL

This weekend I participated in 3 different contests with most of the effort in the NAQP RTTY.

Before the NAQP fired up the DMC RTTY contest started. It starts before the NAQP, runs during the NAQP, and continues after the NAQP ends. I worked just 36 stations on 15m & 20m. Conditions didn’t seem good for me, but it killed some time.

Here’s a map of the contacts (click to enlarge):

Here’s the N1MM score summary:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  DXCC   Area   Cont
   14      20     20    10      0     0
   21      16     16     9      3     4
Total      36     36    19      3     4
Score : 3,168

At 2pm local time, the NAQP fired up. It was confusing at the start since there were stations working the DMC RTTY contest that was going on and stations now working the NAQP contest that just started. It didn’t take long but it seemed to me that most of the DMC stations took a break for a while or moved to other bands less used by the NA stations. I turned the hexbeam to the west since I’m mostly working stations to the west of NJ and I heard S5 noise on 15m and 20m. I switched to the G5RV and I heard the same noise. If I point the beam to the south, the noise goes completely away. I dealt with it throughout most of the contest but it definitely impacted my ability to hear stations. A local ham was working stations I couldn’t even hear or see in the waterfall. You can tell from the low count in the 15m totals how challenging it was.

10m was quiet for both noise and unfortunately RTTY signals. I switched to 10m a few times but there wasn’t any activity. Late in the afternoon I switched to 40m and there were a few stations active. After working them I parked myself on an open frequency, called CQ and worked a bunch of stations. I switched back to the higher bands and the noise had disappeared so I worked some stations I probably couldn’t hear with the noise. As the sun started to get low in the sky I was back on 40m where there was a lot of activity both in S&P and CQing.

As things were rolling along on nicely on 40m when my wife told me it was time to head out to a friend’s party. A couple hours later we got home and I got back on 40m and 80m to make some contacts before calling it a night and heading to bed. I missed logged 7 states with most of those in the immediate area since I wasn’t on 80m until the very end.

Here’s the summary of contacts by band for the NAQP contest:

 Band    QSOs    Pts   Sec
  3.5      26     26    16
    7     119    119    41
   14     118    118    38
   21      24     24    13
   28       3      3     3
Total     290    290   111
Score : 32,190

On Sunday I decided to clean up things for outstanding QSL cards I needed to send, most in reply to those that sent them to me asking for a QSL in return. While I was doing that I had the radio on, flipped to 6m, and heard one of my club members a town away calling CQ. I realized it was the CQ WW VHF contest so I fired up N1MM, worked him and then on and off worked a station here or there. The stations ended up being local such as NJ, NY or CT and then FL with a lone LA (Louisiana) station.

I worked 12 stations in 9 different grids. I did end up getting everything done I needed with QSL cards. I’ll write about that next.

All scores sent in and also uploaded to LoTW, eQSL and ClubLog.

73,
K2DSL

I have some catching up to do as I’ve fallen behind in my short write ups. On July 4th weekend was the DLDX RTTY contest which runs for 24 hours. There were activities going on but I got some time on the air and was able to work 176 Qs.  As you can see from the breakout, most activity was on 15m & 20m which is when I was able to be at the radio.

You get more points for DX (outside the US) contacts but US contacts still get points and are multipliers.

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

Here’s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  DXCC   Area
  3.5       5     30     2     4
    7      18    150     6     7
   14      66    935    28     8
   21      84   1150    32    10
   28       3     25     2     2
Total     176   2290    70    31

Score : 231,290

73,
K2DSL