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.

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…