Saturday was a 12 hour BARTG RTTY Sprint contest starting at 7am ET (1200z). I got on a couple hours after the start and activity was pretty good. What wasn’t good for me was the noise on the bands with 20m, 15m & 10m seeming very noisy and only stronger signals were being decoded. 10m activity was lowered than I would have wanted and I’m not sure if it was just me or just not a lot of activity there.

Based on discussion posts on the RTTY reflector after recent major RTTY contests, I adjusted one of my macros to remove the CQing stations call sign from being sent when I send my exchange. For example, I used to send WA5ZUP TU 123 123 K2DSL and modified it to TU 123 123 K2DSL. Didn’t notice any downside from doing this, at least in this contest where I didn’t experience multiple stations on the same or near overlapping frequencies where they might be confused on who I was sending my report to.

During a check on 10m to see if I could hear anyone I saw a spot for GU0SUP at 1400z. For me he was strong but dropped out right when he was sending his report. Took a couple retries by Phil but he came back up nice and strong. Thanks for hanging in there for me.

I think I worked HZ1PS from Saudi Arabia on 15m, but a station kept covering up his acknowledgement. I put him in my log so I’ll get dinged if I’m not in his log and he won’t get dinged if I am in his log.

I worked RU0LL late on 20m. He was very strong and I had a perfect copy on him. You can see in the map below he’s the only contact I had with someone near Asia. I heard a couple of JAs but none very strong and that could hear me. I didn’t find any KLs in Alaska or KHs in Hawaii when I was on.

I hit 243 Qs around 7:30pm (00:30z) which was the same as last years total Qs. The score for the 243 contacts was 60,750 this year vs 37,908 last year with the mults being the reason. I hadn’t even gone to 80m at this point and was going to take a bit of a break. I got on a bit later and worked 40m and 80m a couple of times before calling it a night/contest making an additional 68 Qs over last years effort. Thanks to everyone for the contacts!

Here’s a map of the contacts created using ADIF to Map (click to enlarge):

Here’s my score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Are  DXC  Con
  3.5      34     34    0    0    0
    7      70     70    1    1    0
   14     106    106   10   13    2
   21      82     82   16    2    3
   28      19     19    8    0    0
Total     311    311   35   16    5

Score : 79,305

Next weekend is the SuperBowl and I’ll be focusing on rooting the NY Giants onto another win!

73,
K2DSL