Monthly Archives: August 2014

2014 SCC RTTY Summary & Stats

Contacts

Now that I posted about the SARTG & NAQP contests from a couple weekends ago, I can get to this weekends summary.  Starting Saturday morning on the East Coast is the 24 hour SCC RTTY contest that last for 24 hours. The exchange to send between stations is the year the operator was first licensed so I send 2007. Each unique year on each band counts as a multiplier for your final score.

I decided to use the N1MM+ beta version that was released. Though it has been available for anyone to use for 2 weeks, last weekend I wasn’t home so this is the first weekend I could use it in an actual contest. For the most part it worked fantastic which just a glitch near the start where I was replicating an issue someone else had and caused my installation to become corrupt, but it wasn’t difficult to recover. Anything else I ran into wasn’t critical and never prevented me from making a QSO and logging the contact. The N1MM+ development team has put in a tremendous amount of time and they are positioned to have an updated environment to build upon for many years.

Conditions were pretty crummy for me, especially early on at 8am local time and the activity was pretty slow at times so I did other things (aka errands) while I went back and forth to the radio.  The advantage of it being somewhat slow was I could mess around with N1MM+ and especially some of the new features/options to see how they worked. On Sunday morning, though I woke up before the end of the contest, conditions weren’t much better and I didn’t locate anyone on 40m or 80m so I worked a handful of stations on 20m before the contest ended.

Looking at the license data that is sent as part of the exchange, the earliest license date I received from another op was 1946 (born 1928 based on his QRZ page)  which makes the operator licensed for 68 years now!  I didn’t log anyone licensed in 2014 and just 1 operator licensed in 2013. The median license year I logged across unique operators was 1979 and the most frequent wasn’t much different with 1978 being the year the most operators I worked were licensed.

Here’s my N1MM+ score summary results showing the 216 Qs made in the contest:

 Band QSOs  Pts Year (mult)
  3.5   16   32   14
    7   64  129   39
   14  124  340   52
   21   12   33   10
Total  216  534  115
Score : 61,410

 

As you can see, most activity was on 20m for me until the evening. I was hoping for more US stations to be on to work 40m and 80m but they must have been doing other things on a Saturday night of a holiday weekend. No 10m activity that I could find and nothing very exotic.

 

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

K2DSL_2014_SCC_RTTY

 

Now time to unplug the antennas as a series of thunderstorms are about to pass through.

73,
K2DSL

2014 SARTG & NAQP SSB Recap

Contests

As I was going to post about this weekend’s SCC RTTY contest I realized I hadn’t posted about the last contests I participated in which is now 2 weekends ago.  Well, here goes what happened back during the weekend of  Aug 16th & 17th…

Earlier in the week I brought my older daughter down to Clemson in SC to start her 3rd year there and now it was time to move my younger daughter into her NYC apartment before she gets started on her 2nd year at LIM College. So there really wasn’t a lot of time to get on the air but I managed to squeeze in some contacts in both the SARTG RTTY contest and the NAQP SSB contest.

In the SARTG contest I caught a little bit of the 1st of the 3 sessions over the course of the weekend. Missed all of the 2nd session. On Sunday morning 20m was active for the 3rd SARTG session. Happened to hear 2 loud JA stations while pointing to EU and worked them both before I spotted them on the cluster. Worked a bunch of JAs on 20m. 15 m was open at 8am ET / 1200z. I ended up working more JA mults then Canadian mults in the contest. With 135 Qs in the SARTG my wife and I headed back into NYC on Sunday to finish up getting her straightened out in her apartment.

N1MM score summary for the SARTG RTTY contest:

 Band QSOs Pts  Area DXCC
  3.5    4   35   1     4
    7   16  170   4     8
   14   81 1080  30    18
   21   34  470  23     4
Total  135 1755  58    34
Score : 161,460

The NAQP SSB was also that weekend with most of the activity taking place during the day or early evening on Saturday while I was in my daughters apartment putting Ikea furniture together until my fingers were bleeding!  When we got home late in the day I sat in the chair and worked as much as I could before I just needed to get some sleep. You can tell from the summary below that I was on 40m & 80m mostly vs any daytime activity that would have occurred more on 20m and 15m . But I made some contacts and can’t complain at all.

N1MM score summary for the NAQP SSB contest:

 Band QSOs Sec DX
  3.5   21  11  0
    7   69  26  0
   14   37  13  1
Total  127  50  1
Score : 6,477

Not bad with 262 contacts made in a weekend I didn’t think I’d even be able to turn on the radio. Daughter moved in, QSOs made, logs sent to all services/sponsors, and I’m a happy fellow! Apologies again for the late post.

73,

K2DSL

 

 

2014 WAE CW Contest

Contests

I was able to pop into the WAE CW contest over the weekend for a few hours each day. This contest allows a US station to only make contact with an European station to exchange a serial number. A twist in this contest is it also allows exchanging QTCs which is where we’d send a list of 10 contacts made – their time, call and serial number received from the other station. Each QTC equates to a “contact” from a points perspective so if you work 100 stations and make 100 actual QSOs, you can double the number of points by also sending 10 batches of 10 QSOs to 10 different stations you work. I’m not comfortable enough with CW to do QTCs so I declined. For CW, we’d send the info so it wouldn’t be that difficult so maybe next year I’ll consider sending CW QTCs. I have no issue with QTCs during the RTTY version of the contest where we can send and receive those with EU stations.

Friday night about 1 hour after the contest started I got on and made 24 contacts all on 20m in just over 30 mins. I had family in from out of town so I spent time with them vs being on the radio. I checked 15m but there were no stations heard.

Saturday morning I started out on 20m but there was little activity and I moved to 15m where I made most of the contacts until early afternoon when 15m seemed to fade and all activity was on 20m. Somewhere on Sat I got pulled along to a pet store to check out new kittens to adopt so there was some furry things in the house as our previously adopted cat of 14 yrs had recently passed away. I wrapped up my radio time for the day around 3:30pm ET (1930z) and headed off with the entire family to a pre-season NY Giants football game. My daughters both leave for college starting this week so it was nice all of us got out together. Finished up on Saturday with 104 Q’s with EU stations logged in N1MM.

Sunday morning I got on and made some contacts again on 15m before moving to 20m. My local radio club family picnic was today so I drove over to the park where it was being held. We had about 50 people there when I took a quick headcount. It looked like there was enough food for 200 people so no one was going to leave hungry. After a couple hours I headed back home to make a few more contacts and help around the house as my girls are getting ready to leave. I was surprised at the end end to see I was able to make an additional 101 contacts on Sunday for a total of 205 Qs with EU stations.

There were a few times during the contest that I followed or might have been followed by K2DSW, an operator in Iowa. With our calls being so similar it was interesting to hear the delay, or not, between various operators when I sent my call just after they logged a contact with K2DSW. Some times I’d hear a pause and sometimes the EU operator wouldn’t miss a beat. I contacted K2DSW after the contest and we had a great exchange which I’ll follow-up on in another post soon.

Below is the summary from N1MM and it shows that 20m was a better band for me over the weekend for the times I was able to be on the air.  If I had sent QTCs, I would have doubled the number of points though the multipliers would have been the same so my score essentially would have doubled.

 Band   Q/QTC  QSOs   Mult
   14    QSO   142      68
   21    QSO    63      40
Total    All   205     108

Score : 22,140

I heard a bunch of non-EU stations on CW while I was in the contest, but since we can only work EU stations, there was no reason to call them. I heard at least two different stations in Turkey that were loud as well as familiar calls for some familiar and always loud stations int the middle east.

73,
K2DSL

2014 NAQP CW & TARA Grid

Contests

I’ll start with the TARA Grid contest since that was quick. I ended up making just 15 contacts against 14 grids. It didn’t seem like there was much activity or I wasn’t on or listening where everyone was. Maybe what didn’t help was the NAQP CW contest started up during the 24 hours of this one? Anyway, at least I got in a couple contacts.

Saturday was the NAQP CW contest and that had much more activity. I didn’t do well on 15m and nothing on 10m but 20m was fine making contacts across the country from the south to the west coast. I was on and off throughout the day but off for 2 hours during peak 40m/80m activity when I went into NYC to pick up one of my daughters from work. I got back on for a bit after I got home around 11:45pm ET (0345z) to log some 80m contacts. Looks like I worked 39 states in those 213 Qs.

Here’s my score as reported by N1MM and submitted to the contest, 3830, LoTW, eQSL, Club Log, QRZ, etc.

 Band    QSOs    Sec   Mult2
  3.5      26     15     0
    7      67     31     0
   14     105     30     1
   21      15     10     0
Total     213     86     1

Score : 18,531

The Mult2 above was a nice strong ZF station in the Cayman Islands.

During the contest I popped away twice to work two different Bolivia (CP) stations that I was alerted to being on the air. One CPstation was on SSB and the other on RTTY. Since I have been on HF I’ve only logged two CP stations before and then I go and log two in modes I didn’t have in the span of under 2 hours.

73,

K2DSL