This past weekend was a big ARRL VHF contest that the club (Bergen Amateur Radio Assoc – BARA) I’m a member participates. It was actually 1 year ago with this particular one that I experienced my first contest. The club usually sets up on a mountain top not too long a drive from where we live and operate for 2 days on generator power from this hill top. The weather forecast called for thunderstorms so the club decided to cancel the mountain top event. In the end, no thunderstorms.
So instead, as we did in the early summer contest, we went to K2AMI’s house and operated with the club call sign of K2BAR. The conditions weren’t good and the contact count was down just a little, but the grid square count (used in VHF contests) was down a lot compared to a similar contact count a few months early. So the bands didn’t cooperate, but the contesting was still fun.
Saturday and Sunday was also the WAE (Worked all Europe) SSB contest. Before I went over to help out with the VHF contest I made a bunch of contacts. You only contact European stations when outside Europe and inside Europe they can only contact DX stations. It was fun and not too crowded so getting through on my 100w and dipole wasn’t too much work. I made a total of 57 contacts with most being Sat before leaving for the day. A few more Sat night and a few on Sunday, but it was primarily the same group of stations calling CQ most of the contest. Nothing exotic for me with the exception of a contact in Iceland which I think is my 1st contact there.
The WAE contest also uses QTCs which I need to read up on. I *think* I just give 10 previous contacts to the other station and you get points for it. I ignored them during the contest but want to read up on them in case other contests start to use them or when the next WAE contest rolls around.
Looking at the contest calendar, there’s a lot of different contests coming up this weekend. There’s multiple QSO parties and a Scottish/Russian RTTY contest. Running multiple QSO party contests could be pretty darn confusing. Looks like 2 of the 3 QSO contests are RS(T) + State but one uses a serial number. Would be nice if they were the same. Then maybe you could log in one N1MM instance and split things up after the contest.
73, K2DSL