Monthly Archives: September 2012

2012 WAE SSB Contest Summary

This weekend was supposed to be the Sept ARRL VHF contest with my local club where we head up to a mountain top, set up a couple of towers with VHF (440/220/144 & 6m) antennas and operate, but the weather forecast was bad so it was cancelled. A good thing it was cancelled as Saturday was nasty with intermittent downpours, high winds, tornado warnings and 2 confirmed tornado touchdowns in NYC.  I didn’t even operate on Saturday in the WAE contest after a morning of activities and then the bad weather.

The WAE contests are interesting in that they add QTCs into the mix. A QTC is when you send up to 10 previous contacts you made to the other station. The info includes the time of the contact, the callsign of the station and the exchange the station gave you. For points, it’s the same as making a contact, so if you make 10 actual QSOs and on the 11th QSO you send them 10 QTCs, you have logged 21 points. In the SSB contest, I can only make a contact with European stations and I am the one to send them the QTCs (WAE RTTY contest has different rules).

Friday night I made a dozen contacts on 20m and 40m all with stations having nice strong signals. Saturday was a washout with the horrible weather so no contacts were made.

Sunday morning was beautiful and no indication of how bad the weather was the previous day with the exception of my fan dipole having the 20m and 15m legs wrapped around each other. I went out, lowered one end of the antenna, untangled the wires and hoisted it back up. I spent time on and off throughout the day making contacts with a lot of activity on 15m.

European ops were very aggressive asking for QTCs which was great. Even if I didn’t have a full set of 10 to send they wanted what I had. I very rarely got to more then 10 without an op asking for QTCs. 10m had some short openings but nothing too long. I checked often to see if anyone was calling CQ.

Late in the day activity moved to 20m and other then a couple at the end on 40m the activity was on 20m. I ended up with just a couple QTCs I could have given out so I essentially doubled my points by sending almost all my QSOs as QTCs. A fun twist to the standard exchange. I’m not sure why so many non-EU ops said “No QTCs” unless they were fresh out or just not comfortable sending them. I never turned down a request.

Here’s my score summary from N1MM:

 Band  Q/QTC  QSOs   Mlt
    7    QSO    11    18
   14    QSO    60    46
   14   SQTC    50     0
   21    QSO    53    46
   21   SQTC    65     0
   28    QSO     4     8
   28   SQTC     3     0
Total    All   246   118

Score : 29,028

 

Here’s a map of the contacts made using ADIF2Map (click for a larger view):

 

Now to see if I can get Swains Island – NH8S…

73,
K2DSL

2012 Russian RTTY Contest

Friday into Saturday was the 24 hour Russian RTTY contest. Had a few things to deal with over the weekend and thought I’d just get on to give out a couple of quick points. I participated a bit more than that.

Got on to make a couple contacts starting out with K1SFA @ K1TTT who I quickly found on 40m. Made another half dozen on 40m before checking 20 which had some activity. Worked 15 or so stations and checked 15m. AL9A was booming in on 15m and then I worked another US station but didn’t hear anything else. Went back to 20m and worked some more before heading back to 40m. Worked some there and came across TA2ZF in Turkey who was pretty loud. He wasn’t spotted yet from what I could tell but there were louder stations then me working him. I came back in a few more mins, could still work hear him and worked my first TA on 40m. I worked a couple more on 40m and 20m before checking 15m before calling it a night and came across BA2IA in China. He was up and down but I could get a good copy on him. Took a couple mins but I did work him for my first China contact in the log! I then called it a night.

Sat morning I got on to see what I could hear and with the radio still on 15m I heard ZC4LI (UK Base on Cyprus). Steve is an active contestor who I worked a few times in 2008 and 2009 but hadn’t worked much since (one in 2010 and twice in 2011). It was nice to work him for the first time in 2012. 10m was open to Europe – worked Germany, Serbia, Romania and Hungary. Bands seemed to drop out shortly after that and then were less active whenever I was able to hop on for a bit and check.

I received a nice TNX LOUD AS ALWAYS exchange from DO4DXA. I worked TA2ZF in Turkey again on 20m mid-day Sat and heard him continuously through the contest.

Midday on Saturday I worked TG9 and KH7 on 10m both with strong signals.

I loaded the logs from N1MM into DXKeeper, uploaded the QSOs to LoTW and eQSL as well as sent it in to the contest sponsor. This morning when I looked, the contact with China is already confirmed on LoTW for a new one.

Here’s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  DXC   OBL
    7      13     80    4     2
   14      72    585   29     7
   21      59    500   28     2
   28       9     85    7     0
Total     153   1250   68    11

Score : 98,750

 

Here’s a map of the contacts made (using ADIF2Map) – click to enlarge:

 

73,
K2DSL