This afternoon was the 2011 BARTG Sprint 75 baud RTTY ham radio contest. Most RTTY contests run at 45 baud (60 words per minute) but this contest and a few others run at 75 baud (100 words per minute) so text sent/received just happens a bit faster. The exchange itself is also short with just a serial number and not even an obligatory 599 so you can whip through a contest QSO quickly.  It’s a 4 hour contest with a rule that you need to stay on any band for 5 mins if you make a contact so you can’t pop back and forth between bands without staying a while on each.

The money band was 20m though there was some activity on 15m. I’m not sure what impact the 5 min band change rule has on folks trying 15m  more. I guess if folks do make a contact, they need to hang around for at least 5 mins, but I wonder if folks avoided making a contact so they didn’t have to stick around?

My contacts started out being primarily NA based at the start, but the EUs eventually came in strong and stayed strong for me throughout the remainder of the contest. I spent a bunch of time calling CQ and then scanning the band and finding a spot to call CQ again. The band wasn’t too crowded, like it will be next weekend in the CQ WW RTTY contest, so finding a spot even with just 100w wasn’t difficult. I had many DX stations come back to me when I was calling CQ so thanks to all of them for finding me.

I popped over to 40m just near the end of the contest and made a few quick contacts and also the 3 call area which I didn’t log on 15m or 20m. I only worked 2 Canadian call areas and didn’t here any VK or JA stations. Not sure if folks on the west coast logged any VK or JAs.

Here’s a map of the contacts made during the contest (click to enlarge):

You can see from the map that there wasn’t anything logged into the pacific and other than 1 South America station I didn’t hear much in that direction.

Here’s the  N1MM score summary:

  Band    QSOs    DXCC   Areas   Cont
    7      10        0       1     0
   14      88       22      10     4
   21      19        1       1     0
Total     117       23      12     4

Score : 16,380

I’m looking forward to future 75 baud RTTY contests.

73,
K2DSL