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.

I entered as mixed mode CW & SSB but most of my 300 contacts were on CW. I tried to do some SSB but it seemed like every station had a pileup going and I wasn’t getting through. This contest involves a bonus for contacting the HQ station of each country’s radio association, I ended up contacting 49 of them. Luxembourg’s was the most difficult with so many people calling at once. I made a contact in Japan and one in Kazakhstan which is the first time I’d contacted them in a contest. Also made a couple contacts in far east Russia. This was a fun one, looking forward to…

I saw someone else posted their CQ WW contest certificate so I checked and I had two, I got 1st Place Rookie – Low Power in North America in the CQ WW SSB 2019 contest! and 1st Place – Rookie in the #4 Call Area for CQ WW CW 2019!

I made a decent amount of contacts in the 5 hours I operated this contest. 2 contacts with Hawaii. I had a conference earlier in the day so I made a late start. 40m had a lot of QSB so I’m hopeful I was able to complete some of the contacts as I lost contact before getting the Thank You (TU) message from some of them. I’d really like a bigger antenna. I googled around for them after the contest, the one I like is 80ft long and would need a large tower to hold it. Someday.

I’ve started the CW Academy intermediate class and my advisors have asked us to set weekly goals and then report on them. For my first week I set a goal of 50 QSO’s in the NAQP CW contest. I was able to get 79 QSOs. I found that I’m getting pretty good at copying callsigns, even the fast ones. I’m not too bad with states but I’m not good at all at copying names. Names like Al, Ed, Tom or Bob are pretty easy but ones like Bryant, Niz or Tree threw me off a lot. It was a fun way to practice my CW. I sent my name as…