SPARC Homebrew Night 2022
Winter Field Day 2022
Winter Field Day at the Clearwater Fire Training facility with SPARC, UPARC and CARS.
Florida POTA meetup – K-1848 Colt Creek State Park
Drove up to the Florida POTA meetup at Colt Creek State Park K-1848 which is also inside Green Swamp Conservation Area K-5330 so it counts for 2 parks. Right when I got there a few people were making UHF/VHF contacts with each other that count for park-to-park, so I got 42 park-to-park contacts in about 5 minutes which was fun. I met quite a few people I’ve seen on the Facebook group. I didn’t setup my stations since there were so many going already. I got a brownie with my name and callsign on it.
ARRL RTTY Roundup 2022 – 100 contacts
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.
2021 Ham Radio year in review
Overall a pretty slow year for ham radio for me. There weren’t many DXpeditions, I enjoy chasing them. I did complete my DXCC for CW so now I have all 3. I also completed the Worked All States Triple Play. I made 10 or more contacts in 132 Wednesday CWT mini contests, which will earn me a Gold participation medal, which was 1672 contacts, I have to work most of the time on Wednesday’s so I usually just get around 10 or so can get back to work. Here’s my Logbook of the World totals: 9,324 Confirmed QSOs 176 DXCC mixed 103 DXCC CW (+6) 113 DXCC Phone (+1) 147…
CQ Worldwide CW 2021 – 371 Contacts!
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:
ARRL Sweepstakes CW 2021 – 214 contacts
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…
K-6700 Sawgrass Lake Park – SPARC in the Park
We activated K-6700 Sawgrass Lake Park which is one of the newer added Parks, in St. Petersburg, with the St Petersburg Amateur Radio Club. We got quite a few park-to-park contacts and we’d have everyone send their callsigns out so we gave people quite a boost to their P2P contacts. Billy KN4LUZ made a video:
K-4756 Mount Grace State Forest
While I was in MA I had time for an activation. There’s quite a few state forests next to eachother but I picked Mount Grace. This was a quick activation, I made 14 contacts with 2 park-to-park.
K-3148 Townshend State Park
On my way from the Adirondacks to Massachusetts it was a bit rainy but I had time for an activation. I was looking for a spot in the Green Mountains park to activate but the rain was coming down pretty heavy due to the remnants of hurricane Ida coming through. I passed a dam that was in Townshend State Park so I pulled in to do an activation as well it was during the weekly CWT contest so I participated in that. I made the minimum 10 contacts here, I had decent signal into Europe but had trouble getting the US stations to respond. Quite a few people drove into…