This weekend I had a bunch of prior commitments so operating in the contest was limited. Fri night I went out to dinner with my younger daughter while me wife and older daughter were at a friends Sweet 16. After a late dinner I got on 40m and 80m and made 36 contacts before calling it quits.

Saturday morning I operated for a couple hours before being gone from noon to 9:30pm local time – prime 15m & 20m time.  I started out Saturday morning making 2 contacts to Hawaii on 80m which I hadn’t done before. I also had 2 on 40m shortly after. I left on Saturday with 118 contacts. When I got back that evening I again made some more on 40m and 80m before calling it a night.

Sunday morning I got on again for a couple hours before heading out to my radio clubs annual auction. When I returned home I got back on 15m and 20m before moving to 40m and 80m as the sun set.

Bands were active but not like the. ARRL DX CW contest. Only one 10m contact for me which was D4C in Cape Verde but maybe I missed more openings when I was away from the radio. 20m was a zoo where almost any frequency I tuned to I could hear 3 stations. I attribute that to a combination of a wire antenna receiving from all directions, the SSB filters on the TS-2000 and crowded bands. 15m was more spread out so it was usually just a single signal I would hear on any frequency.

Comparing my contacts with last year I made about the same number this year with less operating time and more multipliers to give me a bit higher score. Others from my local club operated as I either heard them on the air, spoke with them at the auction, or they emailed me. Seems to be the most club members I can recall operating a contest which is good.

March is a busy month on the weekends with family commitments and also a big system release at work the end of the month so as I predicted in describing my total contacts for last month an just breaking the 2000 mark, this month will likely be much less.

Band    QSOs   Pts  Cty
3.5      28     84   23
  7      35    105   31
 14      91    273   55
 21      61    183   30
 28       1      3    1
Total     216  648  140

Score : 90,720

73 & good DX!
K2DSL

Looks like the TX4T DXpedition team that was in the French Polynesia have uploaded their logs and my 15m and 20m contacts with them during the ARRL DX CW contest are now confirmed. Thanks for the 2 contacts and confirming a new DXCC for me. That puts me at 152 confirmed DXCCs.

Maybe there’ll be some new DXCC out there waiting for me this weekend during the ARRL DX SSB contest. I have 2 big commitments this weekend with a competition for 1 of my daughters on Saturday and our club’s ham radio auction on Sunday so I’ll be operating around those. Saturday’s competition with my daughter will probably take somewhere between 8 & 10 hours of time and the ham radio auction probably another 5 or 6 hours.

Happy DXing,
K2DSL

I just happened to notice that if I was interested in doing so I could receive the eQSL WAS and eQSL DXCC awards.  I’d just have to become at least a bronze member to print out the certificates.

I upload to eQSL because it is pretty automated from my logging program and it might help others if they are using it but I really don’t use it. I think it would be great if everyone used ARRL’s LoTW for electronic QSLing but I understand some folks have issues with the ARRL or it’s a hassle for them to get it working though I don’t have issues with either.

73,
K2DSL

I happened to notice on Sunday morning after the NAQP RTTY contest that I was just shy of 2000 contacts for the month. Maybe that subconciously got me to make North Carolina QSO Party contacts?

After the NAQP I was about 30 contacts short of logging 2000 for the month. Prior to Feb 2010 the most contacts logged in a given month was 1595 in January 2010 and 1427 in March 2009. I was able to exceed 2000 contacts but not by a lot because February ended 7:00pm local time during the NC QSO Party. Though I logged 76 contacts, 30 of those fell into March giving me 2016 logged contacts in February 2010.

The biggest contributors to the numbers were thew CQ WPX RTTY contest with 860 Q’s, ARRL DX CW contest with 491 Q’s, the NA RTTY QSO Party with 358 Q’s and the XE RTTY contest with 186 Q’s.

I would anticipate that March’s totals will be less and possibly a lot less as we have a lot of weekend activities planned including what couple be some travel / mini vacation over at least one weekend.

Thanks to everyone for all the contacts!

K2DSL

On Saturday I participated in the NA RTTY QSO Party and hadn’t planned to do much operating on Sunday. I had a couple of computers dropped off by friends to work on to clean up some viruses that they had. Well while running through cleaning them up, I often have to wait while things run. I got on the air and heard some NC stations so I started to log them. In the end I ended up with 76 contacts during a part time effort.

I was surprised to see that NC has 100 counties. That is a pretty large number of counties. I ended up logging a contact in 46 of the 100 counties in no short part due to the very impressive efforts of a couple of mobile stations including AA4XX, N4C, N5WR & NY4N. Those stations put some serious miles on their vehicles during the contest.

Here’s my score summary:

Band   Mode  QSOs   Pts  Sec
 3.5   CW      23    60   11
 3.5   LSB     17    21    6
   7   CW      26    68   20
   7   LSB     10    10    9
Total  Both    76   159   46

Score : 7,314

73,
K2DSL

Saturday was the 2010 North America RTTY QSO Party (NAQP). A single operator can be active for 10 of the 12 hours the contest runs. Operators are also limited to 100w which is all I have anyway.

The night before was a warm up and I had decided to try and use the ESM function in N1MM. That means N1MM sends certain macros based on what info is entered and where the cursor is when you press the Enter key. Prior I would press specific function keys based on what I wanted to send. It took some getting used to but trying it out in the warm up the night before was worthwhile. I also tried to use the call stacking option which if in Run mode and you notice multiple stations you can stack them vs calling CQ after each exchange. That was less intuitive and seemed to be hit or miss so I don’t think I have what I need to do worked out well.  During the contest I did pretty well with the ESM feature and pressing enter. Once in a while I’d press enter and the wrong message from what I expected was sent, but that was because of the info entered or where I had the cursor. It’s just something I’ll stick with and should get more obvious as time goes on.

I was able to get on the air at the start of the contest and spend about 6.5 hours of the 10 hours working stations on 15m and 20m before moving to 40m after dark. 15m seemed to have some activity but nothing compared to the last 2 weekend contests. I don’t know if the conditions have changed or if folks just weren’t on 15m. I was able to log my first Alaska contact on 15m. When I needed to head out to dinner with my wife and friends I had 247 contacts in the log. Dinner took longer then planned and I was gone for over 2.5 hours. Dinner was good though!

After returning from dinner I ran through 40m to get any stations I hadn’t logged and then went to 80m. I then got a call from my older daughter asking me to pick her and her friends up in about 1 hour. I continued to work stations and do some CQing on 80m until I needed to head out and get my daughter and friends. It took 40 mins to pick them up and drop them all off. It left me with 1 hour of time before the contest was going to end so I finished scanning 80m and then picked a frequency and just went into run mode until about 10 mins left before seeing if there was anyone to work on 40 or 80m.

I worked for a few non North America DX stations but not too many. They all called me when I was CQing. What I did notice that was a little frustrating were stations that were calling CQ but didn’t end with a CQ or QRZ. As I was tuning up/down the band, if I hit one of those stations there was no way to tell if they were calling CQ or if they were sending their call sign to the station calling CQ. As an example (using a fictitious call sign) they would call CQ NAQP de K2XXX K2XXX . If I was tuning to the frequency I’d see something like de K2XXX K2XXX and not know if I should put my call out or not. So then I’d wait a bit and find out they were really calling CQ and I didn’t need to wait.

RTTY contesting is fun and I ended up with the following:

Band    QSOs   Pts  Sec   NA
3.5      82     82   38    0
  7      95     95   36    3
 14     146    146   32    1
 21      21     21   14    2
Total   344    344  120    6

Score : 43,344

See you in the next contest,
K2DSL

This past weekend was the 2010 ARRL International DX CW Contest. DX stations can only contact US/Canadian stations and US/Canadian stations can only contact DX stations including Hawaii & Alaska.

The most noteworthy item is that the conditions allowed me to make 10m DX contacts.  I made 20 contacts on 10m to 11 DXCC entities which were: Argentina: 3, Aruba: 4, Barbados: 1, Neth Antilles: 1, Colombia: 1, Grenada: 3, Hawaii: 3, Martinique: 1, Nicaragua: 1, St Vincent: 1, Virgin Islands: 1.  Prior to this weekends contest, in total I had 37 contacts on 10m so this weekends contacts represent more then 50% of the total 10m contacts prior to this contest, most of which were US contacts. Along with 10m having relatively a lot of activity, 15m was again a busy band like it was the previous weekend for the CQ WPX RTTY contest.

Fri night after getting home from work I got things set up and spent a little time making contacts. I ended up with 53 contacts on Friday all on 40m before calling it a night. Saturday morning I got back on the air on 20m and signals were so strong from Europe that I often had to turn the pre-amp off and adjust the RF gain to hear the signals well as they were coming in so loud. Mid morning I switched to 15m and it was doing well again. I needed to run out to get a much needed haircut so I left with 73 Q’s on 20m and 50 Q’s on 15m after about 3 hours of operating.

After returning Saturday from getting my haircut and having lunch and getting back on, I had about 200 Q’s at 2:00pm local time. Around 2:30pm local 19:30z I checked out 10m and was amazed I could hear DX stations and they could hear me! I spent about 30 mins tuning and making contacts on 10m. I then switched to 15m and made a contact with the TX4T DXpedition in French Polynesia. I also made a contact with them later on 20m. I checked their web site and I show they already have me in their log for the 2 contacts. After dark on Sat before on made a couple of contacts on 20m with Japan. They weren’t strong for me but I think they were good exchanges. I ended Saturday on 40m and 80m with a total of 337 Q’s and 182k points.

Sunday morning just after 9am / 14:09z I worked J38XX giving me, for the first time, the same station logged on 5 bands 10/15/20/40/80 meters. Not long after I grabbed a fresh cup of coffee and when I sat back down a station was calling CQ on the last frequency I was on. It was a TA2 station from Turkey. I put out my call and he came back to me and I was able to log Turkey again. A pileup then started to build. I see today that my contact with TA2ZAF was confirmed on LoTW already for a new DXCC confirmed.

A couple hours later I was able to log Tanzania for the first time and it was on 15m. I also logged a ZS1 South Africa station on 15m. Not long after I was able to log Hawaii on 10m and logged a total of 3 Hawaii stations on 10m. I then stopped just making any contacts and started to look for 10m and 15m stations for DXCCs I didn’t already have and worked those. Between that and the fact I worked a lot of strong stations on Saturday, Sunday’s # of contacts was down. Early in the evening I logged Japan on 15m for the first time. I switched to 40m and 80m and worked what I could before dinner and the end of the contest.

I ended up with 2 new DXCCs logged getting Tanzania and French Polynesia in the logbook. I ended up working 2 stations on all 5 bands and 16 additional stations on 4 bands. There were 491 contacts with 334 different stations. Those 334 stations covered 76 different DXCCs. Not bad at all for 100w & G5RV!

Here’s my score summary from N1MM:

 Band   QSOs    Pts  Cty
 3.5      43    129   28
   7     105    315   48
  14     200    600   65
  21     122    366   53
  28      20     60   11
Total    490   1470  205

Score : 301,350

73 & Good DX,

K2DSL

During the CQ WPX RTTY Contest I was able to, for the first time to make contact with an operator in India. It happened to be on 15m.

I had posted about it and received an email direct from Lakshman aka ”Lucky” about the contact. We had a very nice email exchange and he indicated the log would be upload to LoTW shortly. We were both glad to know conditions might be improving.

Thanks for the contact “Lucky” and the emails as well. I hope to work you again soon.

73,
K2DSL

Following up with some additional info on my CQ WPX RTTY Contest Summary I have noted the following:

A) 340 contacts made during the contest have so far been confirmed via LoTW which is almost 40% confirmed in less then 1 week. More will trickle in and I would expect a total rate in the 50% range.

B) There were 9 call signs that I worked on 4 bands. 3 of those 9 were outside of the US. I worked 32 call signs on 3 bands of which 11 were outside of the US.

C) US stations accounted for 53% of all contacts followed by Canada at 4.7%, Germany at 4.3%, Spain at 2.9% and Italy at 2.6%.

D) Out of the 436 different WPX prefixes, the US led with 176 (40%), Germany with 26, Ukraine with 17, Canada with 17 and Spain with 13.

Here’s a map of the contacts made in the contest. I loaded the records into Ham Radio Deluxe and exported the records into a Google Earth KML file. I don’t have Google Earth installed on this computer so I then loaded the KML file to one of my web sites and in Google Maps I referenced the KML file via a URL and it generates the map.

73 & good DX,
K2DSL

This past weekend I received a QSL card direct in the mail for the one I sent back in Oct/Nov for the SSB contact made with the DXPedition.

If I’m counting correctly, I now have 149 DXCCs confirmed out of a total of 164 162 DXCCs logged.

73 & Good DX!
K2DSL