I set out with a goal of 600 contacts, last year I got 371 and I wasn’t very focused. Ended up with 21.5 hours according to N1MM+ out of the 48. After the Saturday night I didn’t think I was going to make 600 but things got easier on Sunday and I moved right along. The only one I think I missed that I saw was UP0L in Kazakhstan, just couldn’t get through the pile.
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:
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:
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.
Put in a solid 3 hours on this with search and pounce since I had some other events to go to.
Put in about 8 hours on the ARRL DX CW contest this weekend for 212 contacts. This is my 2nd favorite after the CQ WW CW. Tons of people on the air, the rarer stations all had thick pile ups, I didn’t get through to Kenya or Morocco. The pile ups didn’t make a lot of sense, there would be 20 people calling an Italy station, then no one calling another Italy station a few kHz away. DX stations send their power as the exchange and I use the log from last year, looks like quite a few people got new amps for Christmas, many changed from 100watts to a…
I normally get a lot more contacts in the RTTY Roundup but I couldn’t get a run started at all. I’d call CQ for 10 minutes and get nobody. Search and pounce worked fine though so it wasn’t a signal problem. It was super nice out so I smoked a nice cigar while operating from the garden hammock.
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:
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…
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.
