Saturday morning started the 24 hour DLDX RTTY ham radio contest. I was able to participate in this after a couple months of a lot of non-ham radio activities and I was glad to hear the diddles in the headset. DX contacts are worth more than US contacts (3 times a US contact) and logging a station in Germany is worth the most (4 times a US contact).

Started out at the start of the contest (7am ET) and there wasn’t a whole lot of activity. Bands were on the crummy side and just 20m had any signals. It didn’t improve too much for me until the afternoon where 15m had a bit more activity. I checked 10m a few times and heard very little activity. I worked a couple TN stations and one in OH on 10m and that was it.

During the day I took a bunch of breaks and did some other errands and early in the evening I needed to head out for a couple hours. Otherwise, I would pop onto the radio, call CQ or S&P a bit and then take a break. Late in the evening I moved to 40m which was ok but found only 1 station on 80m. I don’t know if folks moved there much later in the evening but I called it quits before before 11:30pm.

An interesting note about this contest are the varied categories you can operate under. Besides the standard single-op/multi-op and low/high power categories, you can operate 6 hours or 24 hours and even a dipole/ground plane only category. Since I only have wire antennas, I qualify for the dipole category.

Here’s a map of the contacts run through Adif To Map (click map for a larger view):

and here’s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  DXCC  Area
  3.5       1      5     1     1
    7      21    145     4    12
   14     167   1365    26    14
   21      37    230     6     9
   28       3     15     1     2
Total     229   1760    38    38

Score : 133,760

All contacts loaded in eQSL, LoTW and my log sent in.

73 and good DX,
K2DSL