Tag: NAQP

NAQP 2014

Spent about 4 hours playing in the North America QSO Party yesterday. Was just doing some casual tuning around, working a few stations and listening to some of the pileups. Spent most of my time tuning around 20m and 40m. Wasn’t hearing much of anything up on 10m or 15m by the time I got on the radio.

While I was tuning around I also managed to find and work W1AW/5 (OK) on 20m and W100AW/4 in AL on 40m. That was the first W100AW station I had found.

My stats from last night, according to N1MM. Not a whole lot of contacts, but managed a a couple of good ones into OR and CA on 20m.

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec   Mt2
     7      15      15   11    0
    14       9      9    7    0
 Total      24      24   18    0
Score: 432

NAQP RTTY 2014 contest

Spent some time playing in the North American QSO Party (RTTY) doing some casual search and pounce-ing (S&P). Made 90 contacts, including a couple operators in MS and one in RI on two bands. Hopefully they’ll upload to LoTW and I can finish off my WAS(Basic).

Most of my contacts were on 20m, and went down to 40m towards the late evening. 54 contacts on 20m and 36 contacts on 40m. The N1MM logger tells me that my contacts were worth 4410 points.

Now that I’ve got another digimode contest under my belt, I think that when it comes to contesting, I think I prefer SSB over digital. The digital mode contesting just doesn’t seem as challenging or entertaining as SSB is. That probably won’t keep me from entering other digimode contests, but when it comes to deciding which ones to participate in, I’ll probably won’t make as much of an effort to participate in digital contests.

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.

First contest

Operated for the last few hours of the North American QSO party last night. First contest I’ve participated in under my own call sign. There was a pretty good amount of activity on 40m when I was on and I added 17 more contacts to my log. I even managed to make one contact at 5W because I forgot to turn the power up on the radio after tuning it (look ma, I’m QRP!)

Didn’t hear much activity on any of the other bands, although I wasn’t listening too hard.

Had fun tuning around the bands making contacts. It was interesting seeing where my signal was reaching out to.