Overall a pretty slow year for ham radio for me. There weren’t many DXpeditions, I enjoy chasing them. I did complete my DXCC for CW so now I have all 3. I also completed the Worked All States Triple Play. I made 10 or more contacts in 132 Wednesday CWT mini contests, which will earn me a Gold participation medal, which was 1672 contacts, I have to work most of the time on Wednesday’s so I usually just get around 10 or so can get back to work. Here’s my Logbook of the World totals: 9,324 Confirmed QSOs 176 DXCC mixed 103 DXCC CW (+6) 113 DXCC Phone (+1) 147…
CQ Worldwide CW 2021 – 371 Contacts!
I had a good time with the CQ WW CW contest this year. This is my favorite one as all the contacts are DX and there’s really no exchange since it’s just the CQ Zone of your country. Only the US has callsigns were you can’t be certain which zone it is so I just need to copy the callsign. There were a couple of rare DX on that I couldn’t get, HX1TT in Saudi Arabia had a pileup going the whole time and I couldn’t get through. I got lots of others though:
ARRL Sweepstakes CW 2021 – 214 contacts
Did 10 hours of the ARRL CW Sweepstakes. Ended up with 76 of the 83 zones. Missed the Northern Territories of Canada, and PEI, plus Eastern Washington State only had one guy calling(I did all S&P). I entered this one as assisted. I setup the CW Skimmer program on my shack computer and had it feed into my laptop (the skimmer uses quite a bit of CPU and heats up the laptop). This worked really well because unlike an internet based spotting network, the skimmer only shows me callsigns that my radio can hear. This contest has a long exchange with the year you got your license. Lots of 50’s…
K-6700 Sawgrass Lake Park – SPARC in the Park
We activated K-6700 Sawgrass Lake Park which is one of the newer added Parks, in St. Petersburg, with the St Petersburg Amateur Radio Club. We got quite a few park-to-park contacts and we’d have everyone send their callsigns out so we gave people quite a boost to their P2P contacts. Billy KN4LUZ made a video:
K-4756 Mount Grace State Forest
While I was in MA I had time for an activation. There’s quite a few state forests next to eachother but I picked Mount Grace. This was a quick activation, I made 14 contacts with 2 park-to-park.
K-3148 Townshend State Park
On my way from the Adirondacks to Massachusetts it was a bit rainy but I had time for an activation. I was looking for a spot in the Green Mountains park to activate but the rain was coming down pretty heavy due to the remnants of hurricane Ida coming through. I passed a dam that was in Townshend State Park so I pulled in to do an activation as well it was during the weekly CWT contest so I participated in that. I made the minimum 10 contacts here, I had decent signal into Europe but had trouble getting the US stations to respond. Quite a few people drove into…
K-2001 Adirondack Park
After visiting my old friends in my hometown, I had a week before I went to a wedding the following weekend in Mass. I spent the week camping in the Adirondacks. The first couple nights I camped way out in the woods and had trouble getting my signal out of the trees. I made one really clear contact with EA4HCZ in Spain, who I’d spoken with before. Then I moved to a new spot at Jones Pond which was one of the best campsites I’ve ever had. Here I made 79 contacts with 11 park-to-park. I highly recommend this campsite if you like camping at a non-campground site.
K-2032 Chenango Valley State Park
I visited my friends in my home town of Binghamton, NY and had to activate the first state park I’d ever went to while I was there. I spent a lot of time here over the years. I made 18 contacts with 4 park-to-park. This park was pretty crowded but I found a quiet spot to activate.
K-0027 Gettysburg
I did a road trip to the northeast and stopped at Gettysburg on the way for an activation. I’d been to Gettysburg a few times with the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. I got there in the morning and there were very few people there, especially for the size and number of parking lots. I activated in one of the big parking lots after driving through. Only spent about 30 minutes activating and made 13 contacts.
IARU HF Championship 2021 – 293 CW Contacts
This is a fun contest because the exchange is really easy. I ended up with 293 contacts. I tried to run for a bit but didn’t have much luck so it was all search and pounce. This contest has a big dupe penalty so that made me doublecheck a few times to make sure I had their call right before I sent my call which made the search and pounce a little slower towards the end. I had a good time with it. Hopefully next year we can run this one from the club station.