Category: Contesting

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.

CQ WPX results

Got an email informing me of the log check report for my submission and final results for the CQ WPX contest I participated in back in March.

I had 82 QSOs, lost one because I either heard or entered the call sign incorrectly, so a net of 81 QSOs counted for the contest. It’s too bad. The lost call was a multiplier for me too.

Two stations copied/entered my exchange incorrectly and one station copied/entered my call sign incorrectly, so I guess I wouldn’t have counted for their scores,

Final score ended up being 17520. Good enough to rank #54 in 4-land, #262 in North America, and #967 in the world. With the Rookie overlay, I ranked #6 in 4-land, #22 in North America, and #69 in the world. Not bad for only participating in it 12 out of 48 hours.

Fun contest to operate in. Looking forward to trying it out again next year.

NAQP 2013

Saturday I spent a few hours on the radio participating in the North America QSO Party. Managed to pick up 46 QSOs mostly on 20m and 40m. Added a few new states towards my quest for WAS, including CA, WA and CO. I was just tuning around casually picking out the reasonably strong signals that didn’t require me to work too hard to interpret, as well as states that I knew I didn’t have QSOs with previously.

One thing I did decide during the course of playing radio was that the shack needs a more comfortable chair.