I finally got Hawaii confirmed on LoTW in the CQ WW CW contest last weekend to complete the Worked All States. I’ve gotten 3 contacts with Hawaii before this but none of them use LoTW unfortunately. My count for the triple play is 13 CW, 48 Phone and 47 Digital. Gives me something to shoot for next year.
CQ WW CW Contest 2018 – 175 contacts!
I’m still not fast enough to decode contest callsigns in CW on the fly but I read an article about some guys who didn’t know any CW and participated in a CW contest using a decoder. The contest logging program I use, N1MM+ Logger has links to one so I tried it out. CW contests are super fun. It’s probably the fastest contacts you can make. I made 175 contacts. I definitely improved my CW skills and more importantly it’s invigorated me to keep working on it. I checked cqcontest.net where people post their live contact logs. The claimed winner, LZ5R, had 8170 contacts. This is a contest club out…
ARRL Sweepstakes
I did the ARRL Sweepstakes this Sunday for a few hours. Managed 92 contacts in 57 out of 83 sections. The goal is to “sweep” all 83 sections. This is another fun one I’d like to do better in next year. This exchange includes year first licensed. I made a quick graph of the distribution of years from my 92 contacts. I am an outlier.
WAE RTTY Contest 2018
I entered into the WAE (Worked All Europe) RTTY contest. This one is a bit different in that you can send QTC (traffic which consists of your previous 10 QSOs) fo extra points. You get points for working anyone but you only QTC with people in a different continent so signal is important when you’re sending 10 contacts worth of info in one transmission. I made 100 contacts over the 2 days. This is another one I’d like to focus on more next year.
CQ WW SSB Contest 2018
I had a little time on Friday night and Sunday afternoon to do the CQ WW SSB contest. I ended up with 60 contacts. This is a super popular contest. It seems like there was someone calling CQ contest every 1kHz. It’s a 48 hour contest so people put up some serious numbers, claimed first place was over 7000 contacts. Next year I’d like to spend more time on it.
IARU HF Championship
Last weekend was the IARU HF Championship. It’s a 24 hour contest with HQ stations in the different zones. My new call is a zone 7 call but I am in zone 8. Some logging software automatically populate the zone number so I had to correct quite a few people. I was wondering if that was going to be an issue. A couple other people said they really liked my callsign as well so it evened out. Some people heard the first A in AA0O as Papa or Delta, I think I might have missed getting a full contact with LC5K in Norway because of this. He faded out pretty…
ARRL SSB Rookie Roundup 2018 – 5th Place
I got 5th place in the ARRL Rookie Roundup SSB contest. I had 66 contacts. It was pretty slow going for the beginning, the first hour it was lightning so I stayed off the air, then I got 20 contacts the next 4 hours and 46 contacts in the last hour. Here’s my first contest certificate:
Florida State Parks on the Air 2018
I joined up with N1COR and WU2F to activate Egmont Key State Park K-1863 for the Florida State Parks on the Air event. I’ve been to this park a couple times and thought it would be a great place to activate. It’s only accessible by boat, we took the ferry from Fort Desoto Park, see my Not POTA post about that park. We had 2 spiderbeam poles. I setup with 40m wire vertical and they setup with an end fed for 20m. We each got about 30 contacts. It was a fun day and a really great spot to setup. SPARC also contacted me about this activation and posted and article at http://sparc-club.org/pat-kx4hl-and-friends-activate-egmont-key-state-park/
ARRL DX Phone Contest 2018
I participated in the ARRL DX Phone Contest this weekend. The band was full of DX contacts so it was a really fun time. I made 74 contacts in 40 countries over the weekend. Since I had things to do at night I only used 20m so I entered as single operator low power 20m only. If the scores are like they were last year I might get my callsign mentioned in the QST magazine score results for the Southeast region in that category. The usual winner P40L claimed 10584 contacts which is crazy. This was probably the most fun I had operating since I started.