Spent a couple hours at the radio playing in the ARRL 10m contest today. Didn’t get to play as much as I wanted to, but managed to score 28 contacts for 1176 points. I’d have played longer, but the cold I managed to catch from somewhere put a damper on things. Managed to snag SD and ND though, both of which seem to be hard to get states. The ND contact is confirmed in LoTW, so hopefully the SD contact will confirm there at the end of the contest. I should be at least a couple states closer to WAS Basic after the weekend.
Category: Contesting
CQWW 2013 raw scores
The raw scores (pre-log checking) for the 2013 CQ WW contest are now available.
My claimed score of 70716 (had someone notify me that I didn’t appear in his log…must have made a typo or something entering it) was high enough to give me a rank of 856 out of 2020 in the Single-Op Low-Power All-Band category for the world and 290 out of 651 in North America.
Seems acceptable to me. The top 46 call signs in this category scored 1M+ points and it’s not until #693 where the points drop below 100k.
If CQ WPX is any indication, I expect log checking process will take about 5-6 months and then the final scores will be released.
CQWW 2013
Just wrapped up what’s been the longest stretch of ham radio contesting I’ve done so far with the 2013 CQ WW. Started with a few hours on Friday night when the madness started and continued with Saturday morning, most of Saturday evening and the final 5 hours or so today. According to my log, it looks like I was at the radio for around 20 hours or so out of the 48 hour contest.
Thanks to some amazing propagation on 10m nearly half of all my contacts were made on 10m during Saturday morning/early afternoon. There was contest activity across an entire 1 MHz of the 10m band, which is pretty amazing. Normally I have a hard time hearing anything on 10m, but this past weekend making contacts was like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of my 10m contacts were across the Atlantic to Europe, a handful of stations in Africa and later some South American stations.
I spent most of Saturday evening on 15m and a little bit on 20m, getting most of my contacts from South America and Canada there. Europe was a little harder to work on 20 and 40m.
Highlights of the weekend:
- Z68BH (Kosovo)
- KL7KY (Alaska)
- NH7A (Hawaii)
- XP1A (Greenland)
- TF3CW (Iceland)
- Hearing NH2T in Guam. They faded away before I could get them though. It’s a long way for my 100W to go too.
- Hearing a JA5 station. I don’t think they were able to hear me though.
Didn’t spend a whole lot of time operating on 40m. All the interference from neighbouring stations makes it hard to hear all but the loudest stations, and it’s pretty hard on the ears and brain. One of the things I found helpful was to use a narrower DSP filter to cut down some of the interfering noise and make it easier to hear the station I was tuned to. Helped some on 40m, but not a whole lot since in a lot of cases, those stations were just 1 or 2 kHz away from what I was trying to listen to.
According to N1MM, this is how my contacts broke down by band.
Band QSOs Pts ZN Cty
7 16 43 8 15
14 49 117 16 24
21 40 103 16 24
28 81 238 8 31
Total 186 501 48 94
Score: 71,142
Overall, it was a pretty good weekend of radio contesting and I had a lot of fun playing.
SC QSO Party 2013
Saturday I played in the SC QSO party for a few hours. Started in the early afternoon and spent some time tuning around 10m, 15m and 20m listening for activity, but like the TN QSO party a couple weeks ago, the only place I was hearing any SC activity was on 40m.
Dropped down to 40m and started hearing a few stations here and there that I managed to get. Later on in the evening things started picking up and I was hearing a lot more SC stations. This QSO party marks the first time I found a frequency and called out CQ, rather than operating in seek and pounce mode (which I also did). Sitting on a frequency and calling out is a bit of a different experience. I didn’t get any pileups or anything, but did end up making 16 contacts over the course of an hour or so. It was pretty fun.
Ended up the day with 30 contacts in the log and got 11 SC counties, including AA4XX in 3 counties.
Had lots of fun playing radio over the weekend. Definitely need a more comfortable chair for the shack.
TN QSO Party 2013
As a bit of a warm up for the SC QSO Party in a couple of weeks, I spent a few hours on the air yesterday playing in the Tennessee QSO Party.Started off slow, but then it started picking up late afternoon/early evening. Made 22 contacts in S&P (seek and pounce) mode tuning around 40m, including the K4TCG bonus station. Not a whole lot but I was content with it. According to N1MM, my score should be 620.
I wandered around 15m and 20m, but the only TNQP activity that I could hear was on 40m. Picked up plenty of rag chewing and nets on the other bands, but zero TNQP activity. I thought it was kind of odd, but maybe those signals were just skipping over me.
Logging was a little easier this time around because now I have a connection between the laptop and the radio, so N1MM is able to get the actual frequency from the radio instead of me having to go back and edit the contact afterwards.
Had fun making contacts. Looking forward to participating in the SCQP on the 21st. There were apparently no QSOs from Charleston County last year, so maybe that will make me a much sought after QSO.