Category: Ham radio

CQWW 2015

Spent a few hours playing in the 2015 CQ WW contest. Didn’t play nearly as long as I did a couple years ago.

10m was pretty active, and that’s where I ended up spending most of my time tuning around. 10m was good for getting to EU early in the day, and then into South America mid to late afternoon. Late afternoon/early evening when 10m started fading out was when I started hearing stations across the Pacific. Grabbed a few contacts on 20m when 10m died out, and snagged a contact on 40m toward the end of the contest just to cover that end of the spectrum.

Even though the number of QSOs and my score didn’t match what I did in 2013, still had a few good highlights this year.

  • JA7OWD (Japan) on 10m
  • VK2GGC (Australia) on 10m
  • KL7RA (Alaska) on 20m
  • TF2LL (Iceland) on 20m
  • KG4EM (Guantanamo Bay) on 20m

109 QSOs across 3 bands this year. I’m happy with that.

 Band     QSOs     Pts  ZN    Cty
     7       1       3    1    1
    14      24      60   13   18
    28      84     221   16   39
 Total     109     284   30   58
Score: 24,992

Kansas QSO Party 2015

Got on the radio for the first time in quite a while (since Field Day I think) to play in the Kansas QSO Party for the first time. The KS QP is one of those two day contests, Saturday and Sunday. Rain and thunderstorms here on Sunday meant that I only got to play radio on Saturday.

One of the fun things the organizers did this year was have a bunch of 1×1 stations participating, which would spell KANSAS SUNFLOWER QSOPARTY if you worked enough of them. I managed to work enough stations to spell KANSAS, and was short only an R station to spell SUNFLOWER.

Managed to make 22 contacts on 20m and 40m. Strangely enough, with the exception of two stations, the only stations I was able to hear were the 1×1 stations. Maybe if I had played for a few more hours I might have found some other stations.

Fun QSO party to play in. Hope to be able to participate in it again next year.

Field Day 2015

Field Day this year was a little different this year since we were road tripping to Orlando.

On Saturday, we ventured out to the Orlando EOC to check out the Field Day operation there. They had a pretty impressive set up going with a big air conditioned tent and 10 transmitters running. We got there kind of late in the afternoon, and they were nice enough to set up a 10m GOTA station for us to get on the air with, but the band was kind of dead by then. We were able to give my sister, brother-in-law and nieces a good introduction to what Field Day and amateur radio is about though.

Sunday we hit the road back to Charleston after watching the SpaceX launch. Fired up the radio and started tuning around on 20m for the last few hours of Field Day. Got 3 contacts in the log which was good enough for me.

This was also our first Field Day together. Maybe next time we’ll do it again when one of us doesn’t have to drive.

More cards from the buro

Received my second batch of QSL cards via the buro today. 6 cards total from Hungary, Russia, Slovenia, Mexico, Germany and Brazil. Most were from contacts from about a year ago, but a couple of them were for 2013 QSOs.

Always exciting to receive QSL cards in the mail 🙂