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.                

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.

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.

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…

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:

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.