Happy 2010 all! The start of the new year means the ARRL RTTY Round-Up for the first weekend to get things rolling and I was able to participate throughout the contest. It starts 1:00 pm local time on Saturday and goes through 7:00pm local time Sunday for 30 hours total of which you can participate 24 hours. The weather was very cold and very, very windy with gusts of 40-50mph. I don’t think the temperature broke 20 degrees fahrenheit on Sunday and with the wind chill was in the low single digits all day long.
It is easy to get rolling at the start as no one had been worked yet. Started on 20 and checked 15 but 15 wasn’t good for me this weekend – low contact count and low multipliers. It usually isn’t strong but it seemed real crummy for me this weekend and it would have helped during the slower times. I was able to get Hawaii and Alaska early on as the afternoon is usually a good time get them both. I went to 40m but 80m was better early and throughout the evening so I spent more time on 80. I had a nice run for about 80 mins where I was averaging 75/hour which I think is the best I have done so far. When I called it a night at 1:00am local (0600 Zulu). I then took the 6 hour break as you can only operate a max of 24 hours, not that I was going to go through the night anyway. I under the 1st 12 hours with 405 logged contacts.
Sunday morning I woke up after a bit more then 6 hours sleep and got back on the lower bands to start for a bit. Activity slowly picked up and I moved to 20 later in the morning. 15m still wasn’t working well for me with not too many signals I could hear and work though I bounced back there from time to time throughout the afternoon. As it got later in the afternoon I started to check 40m and worked what was there before heading back to 20m until 40 and then 80 were active enough and little was heard on 20. I tried running on 40 and 80 on Sunday and made a few contacts but nothing like Saturday night.
The contest wrapped up and I headed out to our monthly local radio club meeting. There I spoke with 2 others that were in the contest. 1 uses a wire antenna like I do and runs low power like I do. The other guy is an old time RTTY guy with beams and high power. He runs SO2R and has 2 Flex SDRs. I was amazed that I actually ended up with slightly more logged Q’s then he had though he had a higher score. He also had a problem with RF on 80 so he had no 80 contacts. It is probably the only time I will beat him in total contacts.
As I was moving up the band on 40m on exactly at 0300z I came across DP1POL who was working the contest. DP1POL is the German station in Antarctica and there was no pileup and I worked them quickly. That was a great surprise and Sunday night after uploading my contacts to LoTW, this was immediately confirmed for a new DXCC for me. I am sending off for a paper QSL as well.
I missed DE and WV for 2 states and a few Canadian providences. I saw WV S&Ping but didn’t see them calling CQ and they never gave me a call when I was running. I didn’t see a DE station at all. Looking at my score summary you can see very few contacts on 15m with minimal mults. A really enjoyable contest I had a blast participating in.
Score Summary:
Band QSOs Pts Sec Cty 3.5 297 297 17 0 7 156 156 9 5 14 241 241 29 27 21 14 14 0 4 Total 708 708 55 36 Score : 64,428
73 & Happy New Year,
K2DSL