Happy New Year! Got back home from a skiing vacation with the family and friends a few hours after the contest started and after bringing in all the luggage and doing some quick chores, I got on the air. Spent a few hours before I was tired, my back hurt and my cold I’ve had since Christmas was telling me to hit the sack. Of course, I woke up way too early and couldn’t go back to sleep, so what else to do but get on the air.  I spent most of Sunday active on the air before the 7pm ET end where I drove one daughter to an event and headed to my radio clubs monthly meeting.

I was able to log all the US entities in the contest except for ND and Wash DC. I also logged about 1/2 of the Canadian provinces.  It was fun and I need to do more CQing and less S&P. I had good (for me) rates going when I was calling CQ the couple times I did it. Didn’t use any packet clusters and just tuned around the dial. It was wall to wall so it was just quickly listening to determine if I already had a QSO with the op calling on that frequency. It’s also, oddly, less work to get on a frequency, if you can squeeze in, and call CQ vs S&P. Don’t need to touch the radio and click away with the mouse without moving.

I also see from comparing my score summary with those posted on 3830 or the RTTY mailing lists that I need to also hit up more DX contacts next time for the multipliers to increase my score.  Others with generally the same or slightly lower QSO count scored higher because of the DX multipliers.

        Band    QSOs    Pts  States  DX
         3.5     135     135   17     0
           7     110     110   13    11
          14     187     187   25     7
       Total     432     432   55    18

            Score : 31,536

Lots of fun. No new DX Entities logged but lots of fun.

73,
K2DSL