I have done a small amount of operating, most recently last weekend in the New England QSO Party with about 90 mins of SSB activity on 40m working.

I’ve also assumed the Treasurer responsibilities for my local radio club as the previous Treasurer is moving away from the area. I needed to take turnover of documents, banking accounts, etc. I also gave a refresher demo on N1MM logging program to the club at our last meeting as we are switching from CT to N1MM.

I did volunteer again to assist with CQ SSB paper log entry for those submitting their log on paper. I enjoy doing it so it certainly is no bother to help out.

I have listened a couple of times for the Yemen DXpedition but so far no luck. Maybe I should take a day off from work and I might have a better shot at getting them in the log.

73,
K2DSL

Friday:
I started out Friday evening after a long week at work and the bands seemed ok. I was on 20m and after just 15 mins came across JT5DX in Mongolia and worked him quickly. I have worked JT5DX before and is my the only station I’ve logged from there. I worked a couple Alaska stations, WA5ZUP as I do in every contest, and Caribbean stations along with a lot of US stations. Scattered in the mix were European stations. For the first 2 hours I switched between 20m and 15m just scanning the band and working whoever I heard. After 2 hours I switched to 40m, worked just 3 contacts, and called it a night with 75 Qs in the log.

Saturday:
Sat morning with the radio on 40m from the evening before I scanned and worked a half dozen US stations before switching to 20m. I worked some stations on 20m and switched to 15m and scanned and worked the stations there. On 20m I heard 2 loud stations in China but couldn’t break through the pileup. Still don’t have a China station in the log. 10m and 15m were much improved over last weekend. 15m was more enjoyable than 20m with a bit more space between stations. I worked on and off most of the day with occasional breaks.

Watching the cluster as I was turning the dial 15m I saw a spot come in for N2RJ on 40m. N2RJ, Ryan, is located about 30 miles from me. We’ve connected on the computer via a common co-worker we both used to work with. I had not spoken with Ryan on the air before. He had a mini pileup going and I could hear him ok but it took a few attempts for him to hear me. He said hello and I wished him good luck. I saw him spotted on 20m or 15m on Sunday but couldn’t hear him to work him on another band. Just after 8pm ET/0000z, I came across A73A in Qatar calling CQ on 20m and was able to work him before a pileup came, likely from my auto spot after logging him. This was my first contact with Qatar.  I continued throughout the evening where 20m was active for most of it and 40m had some good activity. Nothing much was happening on 80m whenever I checked and worked just a handful of stations there. I called it quits before midnight and ended up with 452 Qs at the end of the night.

Sunday:
Sunday is usually less productive and more searching than pouncing as all the “easy” stations have already been worked. But there’s always new stations to catch on new bands and new folks that are popping in as well as smaller pileups on some of the harder stations for me to work. And of course, band conditions are constantly changing so you never know what’s in store for you. I worked a few stations again on 40m before switching to 20m and came up a VK4 station in Australia that I worked after a few tries. Later in the day I worked a different VK4 station on 15m which was the first logged VK station on 15m and it’s already confirmed on LoTW. I had logged 10m/20m/40m contacts with Australia but missed 15m until this weekend.

I spent most of the day just dialing around 10m, 15m & 20m scanning the bands from top to bottom and working whoever I could hear. Usually if I heard them, they could hear me. If for some reason I wasn’t getting through, I’d tune a bit off frequency and see if that helped. If not, I’d tune away and come back a few mins later, usually getting them on the first or second call. I really enjoy 10m when there’s activity since contacts seem so easy when the band is open vs 20m and even 15m. In the afternoon I started to watch my QSO count as I approached last years total of 567 Qs. When I hit that number around 1740z I noticed that for the same QSO count as last year I actually had less QSO points but 27 more WPX prefixes and a score about 10k more. I took a break for a bit after hitting that number.

As I could smell dinner cooking, 15m started to come alive with the JAs and the VK4 I worked and I was hoping dinner wouldn’t be ready for a little while as they started to peak. I don’t recall JAs being as loud as they were on Sunday so it was nice to work 9 of them, fighting over the west coast stations, before the dinner bell rang. It was a good dinner but I got back on with a little time left and scanned all the bands working as many stations up to the final bell as I could. I finished with 657 Qs in the log which is 90 more than last year and 183,310 more points.

Score Summary:
Here’s my score summary from N1MM. 40m and 80m were light and contacts on those bands are worth more points, but it just wasn’t as productive (or fun) for me to  hang out there and try and beat the conditions.

 Band    QSOs    Pts   WPX
  3.5      15     27     7
    7      62    155    34
   14     239    536   172
   21     241    617   148
   28     100    251    61
Total     657   1586   422

Score : 669,292

Map:
Here’s a map of the contacts made with http://levinecentral.com/adif2map (click to enlarge):

Random stats:
DXCCs logged: 88
Most logged DXCC: US followed by Brazil than Canada
Most WPXs by entity: US followed by Brazil than Argentina
CQ Zones logged: 27 out of 40 zones
Calls worked on 4 bands: 7  - only 1 was a US station
Unique stations logged: 496

Thanks to all those great ops that pulled my 100w signal out of the noise and put me in their log. Hopefully I didn’t blow too many exchanges and I’m in all those DX stations logs.

73,
K2DSL

Friday night my local club the Bergen Amateur Radio Assoc (BARA)  had a VE testing session. We had 19 individuals, 17 of which walked out with a new license or upgrade including 4 new Extras. 8 of those were brand new hams, some of which walked away with their General class license. I was home before the contest started so I had time to setup N1MM with the appropriate macros for an exchange that includes RST (599), serial number and the current time in UTC. It’s a bit of a long exchange and I’d like to see 599 removed, but we all have to send the same thing.

Friday evening after the VE test session I got on the air for a bit. I made some 40m/20m contacts for a short time but things were kind of quiet. Checked 80m but heard no signals at all before turning off the radio. Ended Fri night with just 39 contacts and was hopeful I’d hear more signals the following day.

Saturday didn’t prove to be better than Friday night. I wasn’t hearing many European stations and signals were weak when I heard anyone. 20m had the majority of the activity and 15m was quiet with 10m dead. It was taking me back over a year to before the current sunspot cycle started and you spent all your time on 20m. But even 20m wasn’t great. I checked 15m and 10m often but there just wasn’t a lot of activity. I did catch a New Zealand station which was loud on 10m and he seemed to be loud for a while. Otherwise, 10m was useless the entire weekend with just 12 total Qs. It was well after dark before 40m activity picked up and it was ok, though mostly US stations. I even worked a few 80m stations, but there wasn’t a real lot of activity there either. Ended up with just 205 Qs in the log at the end of Saturday.

Sunday conditions certainly didn’t start out better. 15m and 10m were again pretty unproductive with most activity on 20m. I worked 2 stations on Sunday that I had worked on Saturday and I’d consider them dups. What was odd was their serial number which is part of the exchange was lower on Sunday than on Saturday. I’d have to guess maybe they had a computer/logging issue and had to start over. I worked the contest on and off throughout the day/evening taking breaks and running errands. I did a bit more CQing on Sunday on 20m and 40m. Had some luck, especially when I was spotted by some ops which helped. I usually spot stations myself if they aren’t already on the band map, assuming I’m using the cluster. It’s always nice when I’m using the cluster to see someone else spot me. I closed the contest out on 40m though I checked 80m and didn’t hear anything Sunday evening.

In the end, I finished up with  377 contacts with a few dups on top of that. I did work all 6 continents with just 37 DXCCs including the US and Canada. There were 272 distinct calls logged and only 3 calls worked on 4 bands with no calls worked on all 5 bands.

Here”s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts   DX  Areas   Con
  3.5      14     14    2      7     0
    7     105    105   14     17     3
   14     194    194   29     17     1
   21      52     52   13     11     2
   28      12     12    6      6     0
Total     377    377   64     58     6

Score : 275,964

Here’s a map generated from http://levinecentral.com/adif2map (click to enlarge):

Thanks to everyone for the contacts!
K2DSL

With about 33,819 QSOs, that’s just a LoTW QSL rate of  59%. It doesn’t count the hundreds of paper QSLs I have, though there would be some overlap for the same contacts.

Looking by mode for just LoTW QSLs I show the following:

Looking by band for LoTW QSLs:

Thanks to all those operators, about 4620 unique callsigns, that made the QSOs and followed them up with LoTW QSLs.

73,
K2DSL

For the exchange in this contest, it’s your name and state/province (or just name if you are outside NA). I configured my exchange macro to just send my name and state once and I had 5 or less repeats the entire contest. Conditions seemed to be good enough that I was coming in loud and clear, so just sending TU DAVID NJ K2DSL was all that was needed. Also in this contest, after the 1st contact with a station, they have your exchange since it doesn’t change, so that helps with repeats too.

I got on at the start (1800z – 1pm ET) and the going was a bit slow at first. I would have expected for activity right from the start, but it took about 1 hour or so before activity picked up. Started on 20m scanning S&P and then hit 15m and 10m S&P. 15m wasn’t very active either but that seemed to pick up about 2 hours later and 15m was loud and wall to wall stations. 20m activity also picked up too but 10m wasn’t very productive any time I checked, which you can tell from my score summary with just 27 contacts. I always hope for more 10m activity, though it  could be me with just a dipole vs a nice 10m or tribander beam.

I first switched to 40m at 7pm (oo0oz) and had a straight hour of S&P averaging 1 contact per minute.  I checked out 80m for the 1st time at 9:30pm (0230z) and in 30 mins again average 1 contact per minute. I tried a couple of runs earlier on 15m and 20m but it was more productive to just tune around the bands and work stations. I was averaging about the same rate when doing S&P or when I was calling CQ. Finished up the night bouncing back and forth between 40m and 80m.

Maybe some folks waited 1 hour at the start and got on a little later and stayed on later. 40m and 80m was certainly busy at the end of the first 10 hours so maybe that’s a strategy to consider for next time… or waiting 30 mins or taking a 30 min break in the middle and taking advantage of 40m and 80m later in the evening.

I noticed that somewhere around 390 Qs I had surpassed last years score with 31 less contacts logged. The reason, though I didn’t look very closely when I happened to notice, is that the multipliers on 15m and 10m this year was 38 vs those same bands last year producing just 13 multipliers.  I surpassed last years total QSOs with about 35 mins left for me to operate.My goal is typically to improve on my previous best for any particular contest.

I ended up working 15 stations on 4 bands and another 31 stations on 3 bands including V31RR (op AA4NC) in Belize who had an excellent signal. I didn’t work any stations in ND, ME, VT, DE or WV in the US and 6 provinces in Canada. I did work many regulars (WA5ZUP, N2BJ, AA5AU and others) along with KX9X who is the ARRL Contest Branch Manager. Log was submitted right after the contest and uploaded to LoTW and eQSL.

Here’s the score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs  Sec   DX
  3.5      52   26    0
    7     134   41    2
   14     159   42    4
   21      78   23    2
   28      27   10    3
Total     450  142   11

Score : 68,850

Here’s a map of the contacts made using http://levinecentral.com/adif2map (click to enlarge):

Next contest is the ARRL DX SSB that starts Friday and I’ll only be able to operate Fri night if I get on the air as I’ll be travelling next weekend with one of my daughters.

See you on the bands,
K2DSL

Friday night after getting home from work and having something to eat I got on the air. It seemed unusual with the first 2 contacts being Asiatic Russia and the stations coming in so strong. They were running 10x plus the power I was running but they didn’t have any issue copying my 100w. Over the next couple of hours I worked more Asiatic Russia stations, Hawaii stations and Japan stations. At 9:30pm ET (0230z) I worked 5 Japan and 2 Hawaii stations in 15 mins. Worked a few statioins on 40 m and called it a night with only 29 stations in the log.

Woke up Saturday morning not feeling well so I didn’t spend a lot of time at the radio. I took frequent breaks throughout the day. But conditions were good and there was a lot of activity whenever I was on. Started out on 40m working Caribbean stations and European stations and even another Japan station and Hawaii station. Switched to 20m for a while, than 15m and 10m. Hit all 3 bands whenever I got on. Early Saturday evening I heard DP1POL in Antarctica again and worked them on 20m. I had previously worked that station as well as a couple others in Antarctica. DP1POL was already confirmed on LoTW on Monday morning. Sat evening I worked TI5W on 80m for the first station in the contest worked on all 5 bands I could tune up. Even though I wasn’t feeling well I stopped with 296 Qs when I shut things down on Saturday night.

Sunday morning conditions seemed to be similar to Saturday and pileups on some stations had become more manageable. I was able to tune the bands and pick off stations at a pretty good clip. I even found A45XR in Oman without any pileup and worked him on the first call for a new DXCC entity. Like DP1POL, A45XR uses LoTW and my new one was already confirmed by Monday morning. I also found 4U1ITU in Geneva without any pileup and worked them quickly. I had previously QSLed via the bureau for 4U1ITU but didn’t have anything back yet, so I’m sending a QSL direct to get this one confirmed for another new one. I also worked EA9EU in Ceuta. I don’t have that DXCC confirmed yet though I’ve worked that station before and a few others without any luck getting a QSL. Might need to go the direct route on that one too.

I shut things down before the end of the contest so I could head over to my clubs monthly meeting. I finished up with 530 contacts encompassing 90 different DXCCs worked in one weekend with 100w and wire antennas. I worked 5 stations on 5 different bands and another 18 stations on 4 different bands. Germany, Hungary and England were the entities with the most stations worked over the weekend. I made 11 contacts each with Japan and Hawaii and 8 contacts with Alaska and 6 contacts with Asiatic Russian stations.

Here’s a map of the stations contacted created with http://levinecentral.com/adif2map/ (click to enlarge):

Here’s a score summary from N1MM:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty
  3.5      23     69   20
    7      59    177   41
   14     222    666   77
   21     177    531   74
   28      49    147   27
Total     530   1590  239

Score : 380,010

See you in the next contest which will be the NAQP RTTY contest this weekend.

73,
K2DSL

Though I’m familar with N1MM and digital contesting, I’m sure there will still be many tips that I can pick up. If possible I will try and make all 3 sessions though I’ll be travelling for the first one and that might be a tough one. The past webinars I participated in  that were given by the PVRC I found tremendously helpful.

Here’s the info that was recently posted regarding the webinars. First go to the referenced link below to register for free and just remember to come back at the time of the actual webinar.

Title:  N1MM Logger in Depth:  Part 1 – Overview
Date:  Tuesday, February 28
Time:  9 PM EST (Wednesday, February 29 – 02:00 UTC)
Registration (free):  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/611548330
(registration link also posted on www.pvrc.org under the Upcoming Webinars link)
Part one of a two part series provides a overview of the N1MM logging program.
Series presenters include:
Pete Smith N4ZR
Steve London N2IC
Larry Gauthier K8UT
Rich Ferch VE3KI

Title:  N1MM Logger in Depth:  Part 2 – Digital Modes and Multi-Op
Date:  Tuesday, March 6
Time:  9 PM EST (Wednesday, March 7 – 02:00 UTC)
Registration (free): https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/222788522
(registration link also posted on www.pvrc.org under the Upcoming Webinars link)
Part two of a two part series provides a overview of the N1MM logging program.
Series presenters include:
Pete Smith N4ZR
Steve London N2IC
Larry Gauthier K8UT
Rich Ferch VE3KI

Title:  Getting Started In Digital Contesting
Date:  Sunday, April 1
Time:  3 PM EDT (19:00 UTC)
Registration (free):  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/982837010
(registration link also posted on www.pvrc.org under the Upcoming Webinars link)
Steve Ford, WB8IMY, QST Editor / Publications Manager provides a beginner-level introduction to digital contesting with a discussion of equipment requirements, software and techniques.

73,
K2DSL

Here’s my N1MM score summary for the 150 contacts I made Friday evening:

I didn’t work any exotic locations but it was nice to hear the diddles in the headphone for a while. This weekend is the ARRL International DX CW contest and hopefully I’ll have some more time to participate. There’s some new DX for me I want to work that will be active and I’ll probably target those on Sunday if the pileups are big on Saturday.
73,
K2DSL

In the Delaware QSO Party I made 5 contacts – 2 on 40m and 3 on 80m.

In the Minnesota QSO Party I made the most contacts of any of the contests with 27 total Qs with 23 of them on 20m.

In the British Columbia QSO Party I thought I’d hear more activity and only ended up with 1o contacts, most also on 20m.

In the Vermont QSO Party I made just 3 contacts, 2 with 1 station.

Now time to watch some football – Go Giants!

K2DSL

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