I received my CWOPs CWT Bronze Participation Medal. Even though it’s a participation medal it’s not easy to get. It is award for completing at least 10 contacts each in at least 60 weekly CWT morse code contests in the year. There’s 3 hour long sessions every Wednesday. I’m going for Gold this year, which is 120 sessions, I’m over halfway there already.
Super casual effort on 6m FT8 for the ARRL June VHF Contest, made 27 contacts with quite a few being with people in the club.
Made a minor effort in the WPX contest this weekend. Worked a station in Crete, I’m hoping he reports to LOTW as I don’t have that one on CW and I’m at 99 for my DXCC.
Had some unexpected guests for the weekend so I didn’t get to put in as much time as I would’ve liked, still managed 205 contacts in the little time I was on.
Spent some time on the NAQP RTTY contest this week as part of the Aardvarks Wireless Group team. Ended up with 193 contacts, still didn’t get North Dakota. That’s the last one I need for Worked All States RTTY. My vertical antenna works much better on 80m, I got 53 contacts there. I really enjoy the Flex Radio, the filters are real tight so I don’t get much interference from close by station(of which there were many). There’s still the problem of people calling on top of eachother. Later in the day it was easier to get through.
Spent a good chunk of the weekend doing the RTTY Roundup. With the lower RF noise level at my new house I was able to get more contacts on 80m (91). Someone mentioned in the last club meeting that the underground power lines make for a quieter experience, I think that is the case here. With RTTY I do a lot of transmitting and I noticed that the WX Satellite download were getting interference which was interesting. I don’t notice any other interference in the house but the QFH satellite antenna is about 10ft from the ground plane of the HF vertical antenna.
8 contacts into the ARRL Sweepstakes CW contest I hit my 10,000th contact ever. It was with N4ZZ, I’ll send him a card. I’m still in the process of getting my old house ready as a rental so my shack is mostly still in boxes. I pulled out the bare minimum of stuff to get my Flexradio hooked up. I have a Zero-Five 10-80m Ground Plane Vertical on order and Tom said it should ship tomorrow. In preparation for it’s arrival I purchased a 21ft water pipe which I had cut down to 13ft and set it up in my yard in 4 ft of concrete. For the sweepstakes I…
I put in 6.5 hours on the North American QSO Party CW contest over the weekend. I had similar problems with QSB during the day with signals faded out. Hopefully they didn’t have the issue on their end and I got in the log. I made two contacts with Dr. Ted Rappaport N9NB who did the speech at the Dayton contest dinner last year. I sent him my QSL card and told him I really enjoyed the speech. 5 of us from SPARC formed the Aardvarks team again, we only had one team for this one. The NAQP SSB contest is coming up, I might skip that on if I…
I put in a part time effort (5 hours out of 10) in the North American QSO Party RTTY contest for July. I made 120 contacts, one was Hawaii. I was on Team Aardvarks-1, we had enough people to field 2 teams this time around with people from the SPARC club. Hopefully interest continues to grow. I had a lot of QSB(fading signals) in the beginning but it got better after dark. I went until 1am and then threw in the towel, it goes til 2am. Last year I got 139 contacts over 9 hours, much better rate this year.
