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