This past weekend was the Makrothen RTTY ham radio contest and the NA RTTY Sprint. The Makrothen RTTY contest is three 8 hour sessions and the NA RTTY Sprint is 4 hours right after the 2nd Makrothen session ends.
The Makrothen contest exchange is grid square and the points are calculated based on distance. Also there’s a bonus for contacts on 40m and 80m but no other multipliers. The first Makrothen session was Friday night and the bands were very noisy for me and it was rough going and I only worked a bit of the time before calling it a night. I ended up with 74 Qs and 219,000 points when I set off for bed. Saturday’s session started at noon local time through 8pm and the bands were much quieter and the activity was up. 10m was open from time to time and worked ZS2 in South Africa on 10m. I was working S&P a lot but it wasn’t too hard to find spots and call CQ for a bit which I did on 15m and 20m.
I broke 1 million points with a contact on 15m with JM1CXW, a JA RTTY op I can always count on to hear my faint signal. I worked a few different JA ops and even had two 10m contacts to JAs on 10m which is a first for me. I noticed in the middle of the contest that KH2/N2NL was spotted on 12m CW and since I didn’t have Guam on any band/mode I switched to see and he was coming in loud. It didn’t take long at all to have my first contact with Guam. Starting around 6pm local time I was able to work Hawaii, Alaska and Japan all in the span of a couple of mins for nice long distance contacts. Around 6:20pm local time I passed last years score which is normally a goal I have in any contest. Just after 6:30pm I was able to work the two JAs on 10m. I ended up at the end of Saturday’s session with 281 Qs and 1.223 million for a score.
Right after the end of the 2nd Makrothen session is the start of the NA RTTY Sprint. I grabbed a quick dinner, got back on the radio, reconfigured N1MM for the Sprint and started that 4 hour contest. The Sprint is an odd format in that after you work a station, that operator relinquishes control of the frequency to you and he needs to QSY to another frequency. It is a little tricky at first but pretty easy once you get going. Because it’s very different, not all the ops that are participating in the contest understand the flow and continues to call CQ when he should QSY or the new station doesn’t take the frequency and call CQ. But it’s quick and fun. Because it’s all after dark, it’s mostly on 40m and 80m with a bit of 20m activity. Since you can only work a station once per band, there are points where I have worked anyone I could hear and calling CQ is sometimes futile. If there was more activity, the fun could last the whole 4 hours. I beat last years score but a good amount, but I also was able to put in more time. The score summary is below.
At midnight after the NA RTTY Sprint ended I went off to bed. Sunday morning I woke up with just a bit of time to operate while I get ready to head out to go tailgating for a football game. The bands weren’t very good early in the morning and getting to 300 Qs (from the 281 the night before) was going very slow. Most stations I could hear I had already worked, 40m was empty as was 10m so it was hunt and peck on 20m and 15m. Near 10am (1400z) when I needed to head out the bands seemed to getting better, but I needed to leave. Based on the outcome of the football game maybe I should have stayed and spent more time in the contest. As I shut things down I ended up the contest with 301 Qs and a score of 1,313,052.
Here are the score summaries from N1MM for both contests. Following the summary is a map screen shot of the contacts made in the Makrothen contest with some nice long distant contacts to South Africa, Japan and Asiatic Russia. All logs have been sent in and uploaded to LoTW and eQSL. Thanks to all the ops that made it another fun RTTY contest weekend!
Makrothen Summary:
Band QSOs Pts 3.5 18 23302 7 43 143750 14 141 628130 21 73 371162 28 26 146708 Total 301 1313052 Score : 1,313,052
NA RTTY Sprint:
Band QSOs Pts Mlt 3.5 21 21 2 7 51 51 18 14 25 25 13 Total 97 97 33 Score : 3,201
Map of Makrothen RTTY contacts (click to enlarge):
73,
K2DSL