SKYWARN Recognition Day 2024

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to participate in SKYWARN Recognition Day. This year I’ll be on the air once again helping out with activating the National Weather Service Charleston office (WX4CHS) Saturday morning (December 6).

This year marks the 25th year of SKYWARN Recognition Day. Should be a fun time.

SC QSO Party 2024 results

Just saw that the SC QSO Party 2024 results are available.

According to the results, W4BXC had 115 QSOs, 58 multipliers, 29 counties, scoring 21498 points (including 850 bonus points). Looks like 4 QSOs got busted or something.

That got us to 13th place in the Phone only category.

This year’s SCQP had a total of 406 logs submitted and 27468 QSOs this year.

Next edition of the SC QSO party is February 22, 2025. Looking forward to it.

Field Day 2024

Another back yard Field Day putting the club call (W4BXC) on the air is in the bag. Like last year, we were 1E SC.

As is typical for the end of June around here, the weather was hot and humid, but partly cloudy skies kept things at least tolerable. Fans came in handy as well. Fortunately there were no thunderstorms as often happens this time of year.

Had a bunch of friends over and introduced some of them to amateur radio. Most of the afternoon was spent casually operating in between hanging out, chatting and answering a few questions about amateur radio.

This year, the antenna for the 2m right (just used to monitor simplex an repeater activity) was a janky mag mount attached to the side panel of a PC case, and perched on top of my ladder. Seemed to work well enough. There wasn’t much in the way of repeater activity to listen to though. We did manage to convince a couple of our friends and one of their kids to get on the radio (VHF simplex) from across the yard.

The batteries did pretty well again this year keeping the radios running and putting out 100 W.

Band conditions seemed pretty decent, and most of the contacts were on 20m and 40m. Oddly enough, I heard very little on 10m.

Wrapped up the Field Day weekend with 102 contacts across the 20m and 40m bands. A few contacts short of last year’s total, but I’m satisfied with the result. 200 bonus points brings our score to 404 for this year.

Contest: FD
 Band     QSOs     Pts  Pt/Q
     7      37      37   1.0
    14      65      65   1.0
 Total     102     102   1.0
Score: 204
1 Mult = 1.0 Q's

NC QSO Party 2024 Results

Happened to notice that the results for the 2024 NC QSO Party were out.

W4BXC ended up with 58 QSOs, 38 counties, and 200 bonus points for a total of 4608 points. That put us in 11th spot out of 96 submissions in the SO-OUT-PH-LP (Single Op, OUT of state, PHone, Low Power) category. Not bad.

This year there were a total of 522 logs submitted, and 64352 QSOs.

Looking forward participating in to next year.

CQ WPX 2024 Log Check

CQ WPX log check results arrived in my email a little while ago. No busted calls!

************************** Summary ***************************

       6 Raw    QSO before checking (does not include duplicates or missing exchanges)
       6 Final  QSO after  checking reductions

      16 Raw    QSO points
      16 Final  QSO points

       6 Raw    mults
       6 Final  mults

      96 Raw    score
      96 Final  score

    0.0% error rate based on raw and final qso counts
    0.0% score reduction
      0  (0.0%) not in log
      0  (0.0%) incorrect calls
      0  (0.0%) incorrect exchanges
      0  (0.0%) missing exchanges
      0  (0.0%) duplicates removed
      0  (0.0%) calls unique to this log only (not removed)

********************** Results By Band ***********************

            Band   QSO   QPts  Mult

   Raw      160M     0      0     0
   Final    160M     0      0     0

   Raw       80M     0      0     0
   Final     80M     0      0     0

   Raw       40M     0      0     0
   Final     40M     0      0     0

   Raw       20M     0      0     0
   Final     20M     0      0     0

   Raw       15M     0      0     0
   Final     15M     0      0     0

   Raw       10M     6     16     6
   Final     10M     6     16     6

  Raw        All     6     16     6        96
  Final      All     6     16     6        96

************************ Multipliers *************************

  IO5   KP2   NP4   P49   PJ2   S55