I didn’t have a lot of time to operate in the TARA RTTY ham radio contest, but here’s what went down. Fri night I got on for a bit at the start and it was slow to get going. It wasn’t like a big contest where the RTTY portion of the band exploded in signals. In fact, I was wondering if the contest actually started and went and checked their web page. 40m and 80m were pretty noisy without a real lot of activity for what I could hear. I ended up making 39 contacts before calling it an evening with just 3 DX contacts out of the US/Canada. This is compared to 103 contacts last year logged on Friday night in the same contest. After needing just 1 more section in the recent ARRL SSB Sweepstakes and getting it just 2 mins before the end of the contest, I laughed when I logged a Mississippi contact as my 22nd contact in the TARA event.
I started Saturday morning again at 8:15am (1315z) and operate for 2 hours mainly on 20m. Then I had things to do like taking my daughter for her to practice more driving/parallel parking before her upcoming drivers test. I then snuck in about few more mins of operating before heading out for a couple hours to help a nearby ham friend try and get a replacement wire antenna up in the air. The high winds/storm this past week took down a branch which took down his antenna. It was COLD out but we got both ends up and connected to his coax. After I got home and defrosted, I got on the air for the end of the contest working the last 90 mins on and off as I ate dinner, etc.
Looking at my 2009 TARA RTTY Summary, I worked many more hours last year and the total Q’s shows it with almost 2x the number of logged contacts. Oh well, you can’t always improve on your total score each year as other things come up. RTTY contests are my favorite and even a part time effort in one of the smaller ones is fun. Thanks for all the contacts!
Score summary:
Band QSOs Pts Cty 3.5 43 43 25 7 29 29 11 14 60 60 21 21 4 4 1 Total 136 136 58 Score : 7,888
73,
K2DSL