Put in a minimal effort in the NAQP CW contest. Got two contact on 10m from Hawaii though which is a new one for me I believe. My ADIF mapper is broken so I used a different one:
NAQP CW August 2022 – 112 Contacts
First Feld Hell contact
Saw that there was a Feld Hell sprint contest this weekend and I never worked that mode before so I tried it out. It sends a fax style signal with the font embedded in the waveform. I only made one contact and it was a little cumbersome as I’m not familiar with the QSO flow exactly. I feel like it could be a fun contesting mode if I can get the UI sorted out. Here’s what it looks like:
IARU HF Championship 2022 – 332 contacts!
Had a slow start but then things started to pick up in the afternoon. Ended up with 332 CW contacts from S&P. 15m worked well for a lot of the time. This is one of my favorite ones due to the easy exchange of the ITU zone. There’s only a couple tricky ones, US and Brazil are commonly heard callsigns that have more than one zone possibility. Even got a contact with Kazakhstan.
ARRL Field Day 2022
This year we hosted the summer Field Day at the SPARC club station. After a discussion with the members we decide to be a “D” Class station rather than “A” to make it easier since it was the first time we’ve done it as a single club in awhile. “A” stations use generator power and temporary antennas. We just got the permanent tower in working order so we wanted to test it out. We did setup a temporary Zero-Five antenna like the one I have at my house. Saturday was really slow, we had around 350 contacts, but things really picked up Sunday morning and we ended the weekend with…
CQ WPX CW 2022 – 103 contacts
Put in a solid 3 hours on this with search and pounce since I had some other events to go to.
Dayton 2022
I attended the national convention in Dayton, OH for my second time. The convention had been cancelled the last 2 years. I stayed at the Hope Hotel where the contest events were being held. First thing I did was purchase a Begali key after trying them all out.
K-1971 Lake White State Park
Once in Ohio I stopped at Lake White State Park, this was in close proximity to a highway so I figured it would have cell services so I could spot myself and get a pileup going. I was able to get about 40 contacts in less than half an hour here. Not a great park, more of a boat launch that’s under construction, but it counts.
K-4525 Cherokee National Forest
My next stop on the way to Dayton was Weavers Bend in the Cherokee National Forest. This was a great drive from the previous site in Georgia through the mountains into Tennessee. This site is 6 miles down a dirt road at the end and right on the French Broad River. There’s a train bridge in view that I didn’t think much of until 4am when the first train came thru and then one came through a couple more times during the early morning so I just got up and made a coffee and restarted the fire. I had put up the antenna in the early morning and heard great…
K-4473 Chattahoochee National Forest – Lake Conasauga
I drove up to the National Convention in Dayton, OH this year and stopped on the way in Georgia and Tennessee to camp and do some Parks on the Air Activations. My first stop was Lake Conasauga in north Georgia. This lake has a fairly traditional campground, which I normally avoid, but it’s way out there so there’s not electric and I figured it wouldn’t be crowded on a Sunday and Monday night. When I arrived on Sunday evening there were probably about 20 people around but by nightfall it was just me. This was a beautiful site but without cell service I struggled to get spotted on the POTA…
K-6744 Sawgrass Park, SPARC in the Park
We had another SPARC in the Park event at Sawgrass Park in St Pete. A couple more new people came so I think it’s worthwhile. In total there were about 10 people. I made 20 contacts, mostly as a demo for the new people. Then W4WYR came with the fox and we had a fox hunt. This was my second fox hunt and I was able to find it this time. Though it was made easier due to the park only really having one direction you could hide it. Photos by N2ESP