After posting earlier today about a few new DXCCs confirmed via LoTW, I see that the PS0F DXpedition team to Fernando de Noronha has returned home and already uploaded their logs to LoTW! Thanks to W9VA and K9PPY for the new one. Their page on QRZ.com shows they made over 11,000 contacts over their week stay.
That brings my LoTW DXCC count to 95 and with paper QSLs to 106 confirmed.
73,
K2DSL
I already had a paper QSL confirmation for a contact with Israel, but one came in over the weekend via LoTW. The QSL was for a CW contact with 4Z1UF in the ARRL DX contest last month.
This morning I got 3 other QSL confirmations via LoTW. They were for J7Y in Dominica, 6Y8XF in Jamaica and TO5A in Martinique. The Jamaica and Martinique QSLs are the first for me via LoTW or paper QSL, so thanks for those!
That puts me at 94 confirmed DXCCs via LoTW and 11 additional DXCC confirmations via QSL cards for a total of 105 confirmed DXCCs.
73,
K2DSL
Friday night I was able to participate in my first NA RTTY Sprint contest. In a sprint, after you make a QSO, you take over the frequency for the next QSO. After the next QSO, you need to relinquish the current frequency and QSY to another frequency. I watched for a couple mins to see how the sequences went and jumped in. It’s a 4 hour contest and I was able to make 98 Q’s. Here’s the score summary:
Band QSOs Pts Sec
3.5 57 57 16
7 41 41 17
Total 98 98 33Score : 3,234
Saturday was the Idaho QSO Party which goes from Sat afternoon through Sun afternoon for 24 total hours. I could only find and make contact with 5 different stations for 6 total contacts. I wanted to get an Idaho QSO confirmed on CW and phone for the Triple Play. At least one phone contact has been confirmed but nothing yet on the only CW contact I could find and make. I’ll keep my fingers crossed on that one. Here’s the score summary for the Idaho QSO Party:
Band Mode QSOs Pts Sec 14 CW 1 2 1 14 RTTY 1 2 1 14 USB 4 4 4 Total Both 6 8 6 Score : 48
Sunday afternoon through the evening, the Wisconsin QSO Party ran for 7 hours. Much easier to make contacts there. About halfway through the contest I was shooting for a Q with half the 72 counties in Wisconsin and about 10 mins before the end, I checked off county number 36. Here’s the score summary for the Wisconsin QSO Party:
Band Mode QSOs Pts Sec 3.5 CW 18 36 5 3.5 LSB 8 8 3 7 CW 22 44 18 7 LSB 19 19 10 Total Both 67 107 36 Score : 3,852
73,
K2DSL
I received an email from N2QT (Mark), a fellow contester, who was looking at a very old (January 1958 !!) CQ magazine issue and recognized a familiar call sign. Mark scanned the relevant pages from the magazine and sent it along to me to view. The article is about young women who are licensed amateurs. I think it is ok to quote the relevant content here:
K2DSL, Merceda Pilla, of Trenton N.J. is 16 years old and a senior at Cathedral High School. “Bunny,” as she is known over the air, got her Novice license in July ’53, a few weeks before her 12th birthday. With the help of her brother K2ART and encouragement from W2ZI, Bunny earner her General before the year was over. She in turn helped her dad get his ticket, K2JID. K2DSL uses a Harvey Wells transmitter and a BC-348Q receiver. She spends 99% of her time on cw, mostly on 80. She loves traffic handling and operating for CD. She holds two PSC for work during floods and other certificates include RCC, NJN, RACES and DVRA. An honor student and president of her student council, Bunny also enjoys horseback riding, ice skating, dancing, piano and teaching.
The article also includes a picture of Merceda. I did a quick search on QRZ and there’s only one Merceda listed and it looks like W6FCW in California is the same person and the date of births seem to coincide. There’s no email on QRZ so I will send out a letter via postal mail and include a copy of the article that N2QT so graciously spotted and passed along.
73,
K2DSL
Noticed this morning that TI5N (TI5KD) has uploaded his log to LoTW which gave me my first LoTW confirmed QSL for Costa Rica. That gives me 90 confirmed DXCCs via LoTW. I already had a confirmed QSL for Costa Rica via paper QSL also from TI5N. I don’t know if those will get uploaded to LoTW too since those QSOs are not yet confirmed via LoTW.
Any LoTW confirmations for this past weekends ARRL DX SSB contest are coming in VERY slowly. Of the 209 Q’s, only 21 are currently confirmed. That’s 10% and well below the average I’m used to seeing for contest Q’s.
73,
K2DSL
Checked this morning and YS4M has confirmed our contact. That was the only QSO so far with El Salvador and it is confirmed via LoTW. That puts me at 89 confirmed DXCCs via LoTW.
I’ve noticed that the LoTW confirmations for this past weekends ARRL DX SSB contest are coming in very, very slow compared to other contests. The RTTY guys are tops with uploading (both quick and percentage of ops) followed by the CW folks. The SSB/Phone contacts seem to have the lowest percentage uploaded with the DX stations being much less likely then US/Canadian stations. At least that is what I am seeing so far. Maybe a bunch of the DX ops for this past contest were travelling to their locations and the logs will get uploaded once they are home and rested. I hope so anyway.
In related DXCC news, on our local clubs 10m net last night, W2ML (Steve) who is an avid DXer, involved with the North Jersey DX Association, involved with the ARRL and of course a board member of our local BARA club since I’ve had my license, is now a DXCC card checker. Congratulations to Steve!! It’s of course also great for us local folks to have this available to us. So we have a local DXCC QSL card checker with W2ML and our local club provides us free sending of QSL cards to the ARRL when we hand them to our outgoing QSL manager K2UFM (Warren) who gladly takes them ever time I hand him a bunch. I guess the only thing left is for them to personally come to my house, write up the QSL cards for me, deliver them to the ARRL, get incoming QSLs back from the ARRL, come back and deliver them to me and log them as received. I’m sure lucky to have a great bunch of guys that put so much time in for all of us!!!
73,
K2DSL
This past weekend was the ARRL International DX SSB contest. See my earlier report on the ARRL DX CW contest. The contest is between US/Canadian stations and non-US/Canadian stations (DX) with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii which are considered to be DX locations. I am a bit surprised there weren’t more stations from Mexico on. They count as DX stations
With my modest 100w and G5RV wire antenna I was able to make 209 contacts with 155 different stations/operators. Those contacts covered 78 different DXCC entities in 19 different zones (out of 40 zones). To show how relatively small the contesting community is, of those 155 stations I logged a QSO with, 75 of those call signs I had previously logged at least 1 QSO with, so that is almost half of the stations.
As best as I can tell, I only logged one new DXCC and that was Guinea-Bissau and the station was J5UAP. I did log a bunch of stations I don’t have any QSL confirmation on so I’m hopeful that via LoTW or a paper QSL I can get some more confirmed I already show one of the Alaska contacts as confirmed which is good since it’s my first phone contact confirmed this year with Alaska which will help for the Triple Play Award.
The highlight for me was a large pileup late in the day on Sunday and a strong VK station in Australia was booming in. VK7ZE was clear and louder then I’ve ever heard a VK station and there was quite the pileup. It didn’t take very long and he came back with my call. How my 100w and wire made it through all the stations calling I’ll never know. Lucky is better then good. So I logged my first Australia phone contact. It shows VK7ZE as a LoTW user but I’m sending off for a paper QSL anyway!
There were 2 comments I noticed when a DX station was coming back to me, and I was silly not to note down who each was. One was an operator that came back to me with “Hey David, nice to hear you again”. Now yes, contest loggers come up with various bits of info, but regardless of it being his system which told him, it was nice that he said it. The other comment I recall is when there was a nice pileup going for another station and he got DSL from me putting my call out and came back with “That must be K2DSL, right?”. Again, even if his software did it, it made it very personal. So though I didn’t note the specific operators, thank you!
As for working the bands, 20m was where most activity was occurring. I did my best to try and get stations (and multipliers) on 15m, but with my less then optimal setup, that’s better said then done. When 15m was open, I was able to get a long distance, but when it shut down for me, it was as if there wasn’t anyone there. A directional antenna would have definitely helped with 15m this weekend. 40m and 80m is where I was after dark, though 20m was still pretty active then too. 40m and 80m were almost 1:1 for multipliers so that definitely helps the score. Below is my score summary from N1MM. Thanks to all the operators that picked little ‘ol me up when I came a calling.
Band QSOs Pts Cty 3.5 23 69 21 7 33 99 29 14 126 378 75 21 27 81 17 Total 209 627 142 Score : 89,034
73,
K2DSL
The mail came today and one of the QSL cards was from EA6AZ on the Balearic Islands. It’s the first QSL I have for that DXCC. Thanks Tano for the contact and sending a QSL back so quickly!
Also this morning I was able to make a quick QSO with VQ9JC on Chagos Island. Jim (ND9M) is there handing out lots of QSOs, which I had on 30m CW, to some pretty constant pileups. I thought I had a good QSO yesterday but right when he was coming back to me, everything dropped. Seems to happen right when they are coming back to you after you hearing them fine for a long while. A K2 came back but that was it. I sent my call again and I got a K2 back again so I sent my report in hopes it was for me and he could still hear me. I followed up via email to see if he was able to log me and he quickly replied back that he didn’t have me in his logs but to try again. When I saw him spotted again this morning I waited for his signal to build so I could hear him pretty consistently and after a couple of tries he came back. My QSL is going in the mail. So thanks Jim for the great work and stay safe!
73,
David
Despite less then a 20% confirmation so far in the recent ARRL CW DX contest, my Logbook of The World QSLs have surpassed 50% of those uploaded. As of this post I show 5,235 QSOs uploaded and 2,622 QSLs confirmed.
This weekend is the ARRL DX SSB Phone contest. If the rate of QSLs matches that of recent the CW contest, might drop below 50% again. More RTTY contests and those diehard QSLers and it will jump up again.
73,
K2DSL
Over the past two days I’ve been able to log 3 new DXCCs for me, all on CW.
HK0/EA7HEJ which is in San Andreas & Providencia was on 17m & 20m CW. I sent a QSL card direc to Wil in Spain. His QRZ page indicates he’ll be home the 2nd half od March.
EL2DX which is in Liberia and is an American at the American Embassy there. I got James on 17m CW and sent off a QSL to his US address which gets sent along to him in Liberia.
PS0F which is on a small island off Brazil called Fernando de Noronha was contacted on 30m CW. From what I can find, a likely grid locator is HI36sd and QSL is via W9VA, which I will do now.
Thanks to 3 fine ops for picking me up for new ones!
73,
K2DSL