I got a card in the mail today from HK0/EA7HEJ for a CW contact the beginning of March. That’s my first QSL for a contact with San Andres & Providencia. It is for a contact on 17m and I must have sent the card out before I made another contact on 20m the following day since I didn’t add that to the QSL I sent Wil.
73,
K2DSL
Saturday was the Volta RTTY contest and I was looking forward to a day of RTTY contesting. Got on the radio at the start of the contest (8am ET) and there wasn’t a lot of activity, or was there? I had a horrible noise problem just on 20m. Other bands (G5RV antenna) were fine but 20m sounded like someone was frying an egg. I checked often throughout the day and the noise persisted.
With the noise problem, I had a hard time pulling in DX stations. US stations, most Canadian and Mexican stations were fine. Loud DX stations were a piece of cake and whenever I could hear someone they could hear me. So I worked what I could and took many breaks from the radio, popping back once in a while to see if the noise was there and if there were any new stations I could hear.
Around 6:15pm I got on for a check and the noise was gone, the band very quiet (except for RTTY signals) and I was able to make a few easy DX contacts before I had to leave to go to my younger daughters lacrosse game. How come the best activity is always when I have something else to do? After the game, my wife and I were heading into NYC to go into the NBC studio to watch Saturday Night Live. So my radio time was likely done for the contest since I wasn’t getting home until the very wee hours of the morning. That might not have been a big deal except I woke up the morning before at 4:30 from a wicked rain storm passing through and I was tired.
I don’t know what the noise was and it isn’t there today so I hope it doesn’t come back back, whatever it was. It was a fun contest in seeing how things are scored. It’s easily my highest score (1 million plus points submitted) even with just 67 contacts, off which 2 were 0 points. Seems this contest doesn’t count call signs in your DXCC with the same call area as you (in the call sign, not physically as N2BJ is in Illinois). But to see your points jump up drastically was a lot of fun and I will definitely participate next year, hopefully without noise and with more time to get on the air.
I logged 1 new DXCC from T77NM in San Marino. Since it doesn’t seem that he uses LoTW, I sent off a QSL card direct to him in hopes of getting a new one confirmed when he QSLs. I had 1 non-20m contact and that was a US station I logged just checking the other bands when I couldn’t stand the noise on 20m. Since it was the middle of the day, there was no 40m stations on but this one. Even though I wouldn’t win any award, I submitted my log as a 20m only effort. Below is my score summary from N1MM.
Band QSOs Pts Cty Sec 7 1 2 0 1 14 66 657 15 9 Total 67 659 15 10
Score : 1,103,825
73,
K2DSL
In today’s mail, an envelope with 2 QSL cards from the K5D DXpedition arrived. There were 2 cards to cover the various K5D contacts I made. The difference between the 2 cards is one is a more standard QSL card and one is 2-card fold-out with the fold-out card having a picture of the entire K5D team, other pictures, info on the island and a short narrative on the DXpedition. You can see pictures of the cards at SQ8X’s web site as he designed the QSL cards. The back of the card isn’t show on that site and it contains logos of key sponsors and supporters as well as the names of many hams which much donated $100 or more I think to the DXpedition.
I requested the QSL cards on the K5D site after the DXpedition ended. Their Online QSL Request System is hooked up to paypal and for $5 or more (I donated $10), that was all you needed to do. I felt the donation was well deserved and I was glad to contribute. I’m glad to add these terrific QSL cards to my collection.
73,
K2DSL
I’ve had a few contacts with Kaliningrad stations, but none ever confirmed before today. The contact was made with RW2F during the ARRL DX SSB contest the beginning of March and within a week or so of the contest I sent a QSL card and $2 out direct to the Germany address listed on QRZ.com which happens to be DK4VW. Today in the mail the return QSL card arrived and I now have Kaliningrad confirmed.
Thanks for the quick turnaround Ulrich!
73,
K2DSL
I was just looking at my LoTW WAS account and found some oddities. I emailed their help address to see what they say.
I completed and was awarded LoTW WAS Triple Play #243 which means, forgetting anything before January 1st, I must have completed 50 CW, 50 RTTY and 50 Phone contacts. If I didn’t, I couldn’t have receied the Triple Play Award. When looking at my WAS account and what states are needed on the various bands and band/mode combinations, LoTW says I need 2 phone contacts (Alaska and Hawaii). That would be rather impossible since I would have had to have made and confirmed phone contacts with both states in order to get the Triple Play.
Next, it shows I need a 40m contact with Hawaii in order to have all states on 40m. Well a quick search on LoTW of confirmed QSOs with Hawaii shows multiple 40m contacts including a 40m RTTY contact which was used as part of the Triple Play award.
I didn’t look to see what other awards are listing states that I already have confirmed but I’ll do a bit more investigation once I get an answer on the 2 problems listed above.
73,
K2DSL
EDIT: Boy those ARRL guys are quick! Less then 1 hour from sending an email I received a response from W3IZ (Norm) saying the rules on my WAS account were messed up and that he fixed them for me. I don’t recall ever setting any rules around dates, but not remembering is something I’m good at if you ask my wife. So I just checked and everything looks good.
In case anyone also runs into something similar, there’s PPT slide show that Norm pointed me to on the LoTW home page at http://www.arrl.org/lotw/ . Off on the right is a link to WAS Accounts as a PowerPoint presentation.
Thanks Norm!
My only contact with an El Salvador station has been confirmed. On Feb 22, 2009 I had a CW contact and sent for a QSL card direct to K9GY in the US. The card came on Monday, 1 day after I submitted all the paperwork for DXCC. I’ll add it to the new ones to send in a few months from now.
73,
K2DSL
I applied online via LoTW for the mixed and 20m DXCC awards. It certainly isn’t a very obvious process for someone going through this the first time and I still have some questions, but I took the easier way out by over selecting more contacts then I really needed. I ended up with 160 QSO records selected by selecting all Mixed, RTTY, Phone and 20m contacts in LoTW. In addition, I had 19 QSOs via paper QSL cards checked by our local DXCC card checker. Those 19 QSOs add an additional 17 mixed DXCCs and 14 20m DXCCs if I’m counting right.
The total fee for both the initial application for Mixed and 20m DXCC came to $57.60 which breaks down into $12 for the initial application (and covers the 1st certificate), $33.60 for the individual QSO “credits” plus $12 for the 2nd application certificate.
It’ll be a while before the awards are confirmed and issued. Using http://www.arrl.org/awards/dxcc/appstatus.html as my reference, they are processing applications from mid March with about a 5-6 week turnaround time. That would put my application approval somewhere between the 8th-19th of June.
The larger number of QSO credits submitted was due to selecting Mixed and 20m (the 2 awards I was applying for) as well as Phone and RTTY since they are getting a bit close to the 100 QSO mark and many that fell into the Mixed/20m QSOs were also RTTY and Phone contacts. Now the part that I’m still not clear on is if I had multiple contacts for a DXCC entity and LoTW auto selects one of the contacts for Mixed (say 40m RTTY) and a different one for 20m (phone), there isn’t always a way to tell (that I can find) LoTW to use the 20m one as the Mixed as well. So if I just selected the 20m QSO, would LoTW and the DXCC process know to also apply that QSO to Mixed? I didn’t know so I just took the easy way out and possibly over applied.
Many thanks to all those extraordinary ops that made a contact with me and just as importantly, confirmed the contacts via LoTW or by returning QSL cards to me.
73,
K2DSL
I had just a little radio time this weekend and along with the 7 call area QSO Party and the Indiana QSO Party was the New England QSO Party. I made a few contacts on Sat and some on Sunday. New England is close to me so I need to make contacts on 40m and 80m. Well there was very little activity on 40m (and none on 80) when I was at the radio. Later in the day 40m activity picked up and I was able to log some contacts. Ended up with 36 total, mostly on 40m split been SSB phone contacts and CW contacts.
I logged a phone and CW contact with W1MX/100 which is the MIT station that was operating the NEQP and wrote out a QSL card for those 2 Q’s.
Also during the day I logged a 20m phone contact with 5B4AIF which is in Cyprus (about 5.5k miles away) and got a nice signal report. I sent a QSL card direct to EB7DX, the QSL manager for the station.
73,
K2DSL
This weekend are 3 QSO Parties among other contests. The Indiana and 7 Area QSO Parties were just running on Saturday. The New England QSO Party also has a 2nd session today. On Saturday I had very little time to get on the radio, but when I did I was able to make 6 phone contacts with IN stations and 12 phone contacts with 7 area stations. In the 7 call area I made 4 contacts with Arizona, 2 with Oregon, 3 with Nevada, 2 with Montana and 1 with Utah.
I was hoping to make a contact with W7SUR (Spencer) in Utah as I’ve been emailing him back and forth about setting up his SignaLink, but I didn’t hear him on the area when I had a few moments to get on.
On Saturday I also logged 8 contacts in the New England QSO Party including a contact with W1MX/100 which is the MIT Radio Society station celebrating their 100th year. They are probably the only US station I’ll send a QSL card for this weekends contacts. I just looked on their web page and it says no SASE is required for a return QSL. I wonder if they don’t want them, or they will still reply even if I send one? I imagine after this weekend there will be a lot of QSL cards coming in.
73,
K2DSL
This morning I saw that KG4CN (Dan) has confirmed our Guantanamo Bay contacts made earlier in April while he was there. Dan is W0CN and it was a pleasure working him while he was there. Thanks for the LoTW confirmations.
This morning before I saw it was confirmed I pulled the paper QSL card from KG4SS which I have from Guantanamo Bay as I’m doing the paperwork associated with the non-LoTW QSLs for my DXCC application. It would really be nice if there was just an example or two on the ARRL site vs instructions that are less then obvious to someone who hasn’t already been through the process. I will bring the paper QSL cards with me to my clubs monthly meeting this weekend as one of the folks there is a DXCC card checker.
73,
K2DSL