I put some serious effort into the first contest of the year and came out with 496 contacts. This is by far my largest number in a contests(its 18.5% of my total contacts in ham radio). Really pushed at the end to get to 500 but couldn’t quite get there. It’s a 30 hour contest and you’re allowed to operate for 24 hours of it. I slept for 6 hours but also went to a 2 hour class and to a party Saturday night, I also made ribs, and took a break for some Xbox on Sunday. I fell pretty drained and I still hear the RTTY sounds.
Last year I did part of this contest with the club to see how it’s done and then tried it a bit from home. The club came in second place in their class, I ended up with 101 contacts last year.
There’s two methods of contesting, Search & Pounce where you turn the dial and work the stations that are in “Run” mode. Run mode is where you call CQ and wait for stations to come to you. Run mode is definitely faster if you can get on a roll but sometimes no one answers, a few times I got to 5 minutes between contacts so I would do something else. The app I use for contests, N1MM+ keeps track of your rate, at one point I was over 120/hour but I couldn’t keep it up for an entire hour(not enough people calling back).
The results of the contest take forever to come out, I’ll post again when they do, sometime this summer probably.
Here’s a map of all the contacts I made in this contest:
