Imabug's journey into electronics and amateur radio as AB4UG and VA6BUG
Results for the 2013 Tennessee QSO Party were waiting for me in my mailbox today, along with a very nice award for the top score (760 points) from South Carolina in the Low power Phone category. My first contest award!
Ok, never mind that I was the only submission from SC. It will make a nice decoration for the shack. The certificate also notes that I was a first time entrant to the QSO party.
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.
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.
Let’s see what I’ve managed to get done on my ham radio goal list from January
One of them is built, still need to get around to building the RXTX kit.
OpenBeacon is reprogrammed and works. It’s just not on the air full time.
I need to put in an order for one to build.
Progress is slow. I need to devote more time to this.
Antenna building has kind of taken a back seat to building up the workbench, improving my soldering skills and assembling things.
Got to play a little more digital during the ARRL RTTY Rookie Roundup over the summer. Waiting on some new transformers to finish off the sound card interface.
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:
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.