Comments on: 2010 ARRL International DX CW Contest Summary

By: K2DSL

K2DSL — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:19:09 +0000

Steve – thanks for posting! It is always a thrill to work a VK station. I can’t do much pointing with my G5RV wire antenna but if I can hear a VK I will always try and work the station. On Saturday I was on 20m during the 1800-2000z time but didn’t hear any VKs and didn’t notice any spots for them. On Sunday during that time I was on 10m and 15m though I didn’t operate a lot during those 2 hours.

Thanks again Steve and good DX!

By: Steve Rose

Steve Rose — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:49:50 +0000

David – I enjoy reading your contest “journals”.
We here in VK struggle many times to get you guys in W-land to point our way! When you’re pointing to JA is often hard for you to hear us but we hear you.

I had really good 20M long path openings to NA at 1800Z-2000Z on 20M both days (to your northeast) that I hope you’ll try next time. You definitely need some VK/ZL’s on your map!

73
Steve VK3TDX

By: K2DSL

K2DSL — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:22:59 +0000

Calculating the large blocks of time looking at the cabrillo file I sent in (and I have available to me at work) I note the following times which probably has blocks of time in there when I had some lunch, showered, dropped off the kids, etc:

Fri – 2.5 hours
Sat – 12.75 hours
Sun – 8.45 hours
Total – 23.75 hours

Sunday I was more selective in looking for stations on 10m and 15m vs just grinding out contacts.

To generate the map I did the following:
1) Export the ADIF from N1MM which is where I log during a contest.
2) Load the ADIF into Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD).
3) I then run Ham Radio Deluxe Utilities against it which pulls the associated info from QRZ. Not everyone provides a grid square so after that runs I manually update some using the page I wrote at http://www.levinecentral.com/ham/grid_square.php
4) Once I have a grid square for everyone which is mainly accurate if there’s even a hint of their location, HRD calcs the lat/long.
5) In HRD I then export to a Google Earth KML file 6) I upload that file to one of my web servers
7) I go to http://www.google.com/maps and for the address I specify the URL of the KML file I placed on one of my web servers

A lot of steps but pretty straightforward once you go through it. The most time consuming part is updating all the records where there isn’t a valid grid locator specified in QRZ. I don’t know why folks don’t go and do it or QRZ doesn’t do what I essentially do in my page and set them to some value based on the address in QRZ. Maybe I’ll search the contest mailing list and see if this was previously discussed and maybe put out a request for folks to update their QRZ info with a grid square.

By: David, K2DBK

David, K2DBK — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:52:57 +0000

Excellent job David! I wound up with about 380 contacts overall, I think it was almost the same number of unique countries, though I had about 50 fewer mults than you did. I’m curious about how much time overall you put in, I did about 13 hours. If I’d spent an hour or two on Friday and Saturday night I’m sure I could have improved my score dramatically, since I had very little on 80 and usually do a lot better there.

What did you use the generate that image of the stations you worked?