Category: Contests
January 7, 2019
I put some serious effort into the first contest of the year and came out with 496 contacts. This is by far my largest number in a contests(its 18.5% of my total contacts in ham radio). Really pushed at the end to get to 500 but couldn't quite get there. It's a 30 hour contest and you're allowed to…
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December 30, 2018
I came in 65th out of 263 in my class in the Outside Europe category. I like how fast they get the results out. It's interesting as the other contests take almost a year to get the results out. This contest is the most complicated because you can send the details of your previous 10 contacts and…
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November 28, 2018
I finally got Hawaii confirmed on LoTW in the CQ WW CW contest last weekend to complete the Worked All States. I've gotten 3 contacts with Hawaii before this but none of them use LoTW unfortunately. My count for the triple play is 13 CW, 48 Phone and 47 Digital. Gives me something to shoot for next…
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November 26, 2018
I'm still not fast enough to decode contest callsigns in CW on the fly but I read an article about some guys who didn't know any CW and participated in a CW contest using a decoder. The contest logging program I use, N1MM+ Logger has links to one so I tried it out. CW contests are super fun. It's…
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November 19, 2018
I did the ARRL Sweepstakes this Sunday for a few hours. Managed 92 contacts in 57 out of 83 sections. The goal is to "sweep" all 83 sections. This is another fun one I'd like to do better in next year. This exchange includes year first licensed. I made a quick graph of the distribution of years…
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November 10, 2018
I entered into the WAE (Worked All Europe) RTTY contest. This one is a bit different in that you can send QTC (traffic which consists of your previous 10 QSOs) fo extra points. You get points for working anyone but you only QTC with people in a different continent so signal is important when you're…
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October 29, 2018
I had a little time on Friday night and Sunday afternoon to do the CQ WW SSB contest. I ended up with 60 contacts. This is a super popular contest. It seems like there was someone calling CQ contest every 1kHz. It's a 48 hour contest so people put up some serious numbers, claimed first place was…
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July 16, 2018
Last weekend was the IARU HF Championship. It's a 24 hour contest with HQ stations in the different zones. My new call is a zone 7 call but I am in zone 8. Some logging software automatically populate the zone number so I had to correct quite a few people. I was wondering if that was going to be an…
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April 24, 2018
I got 5th place in the ARRL Rookie Roundup SSB contest. I had 66 contacts. It was pretty slow going for the beginning, the first hour it was lightning so I stayed off the air, then I got 20 contacts the next 4 hours and 46 contacts in the last hour. Here's my first contest certificate:
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April 7, 2018
I joined up with N1COR and WU2F to activate Egmont Key State Park K-1863 for the Florida State Parks on the Air event. I've been to this park a couple times and thought it would be a great place to activate. It's only accessible by boat, we took the ferry from Fort Desoto Park, see my Not POTA post…
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