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Let’s take a look at February and a jam-packed roster of radio contests. There’s something for everyone this month – whether you’re a CW or RTTY lover, prefer phone contests or the newer digital modes like FT4.
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We’re into contest season, with some major events coming up in late October and November. What can we learn from recent conditions to help earn better scores?
That’s our subject for Episode 14 of Zone Zero. Let’s get started.
Thanks for joining in for Episode 14. Time sure does fly. When we started Zone Zero, spring hadn’t even arrived properly, and now here we are staring winter in the face. Boomer, the VA7ST Border Collie is still out there going crazy for his Frisbee but it won’t be long before Boomer is stepping through snow instead of green grass.
Over the summer I added a new radio to the shack – one that provides 2M all-mode capability – and a new amplifier, which adds high-power on 160M, which I’ve never had before. I did some antenna work, spray-painting the Steppir 3-element yagi with hunter green Krylon paint, and putting up an 8-element cross-polarized yagi for 2M.
I got hooked on meteor scatter modes on 6M, and I spent a lot of time poking around inside an old but wonderful amplifier looking for trouble I never did quite track down. But now the tools are put away, the lawns are being prepped for winter, and we put behind us those bright warm days that seemed to stretch out ahead of us forever just a few months ago.
Weekend contesting is back on the front burner here, and even with depressed radio conditions I’m still having a lot of fun making contacts in as many events as I can manage.
Over the past weekend, October 14 and 15, we had the international teletype contest known as the Makrothen – it’s a favorite of mine, because you get one point for every kilometer between you and the other stations you contact.
Scores go up quickly, especially if you can work DX stations.
But if you can only work domestic stations in your own continent – for me, that would be North America – the Makrothen can be a long slog, with low points per contact. I mention this because this time out, that’s precisely what we saw with conditions from the West Coast.
I could hear stations from the East Coast working European stations at will on Sunday morning, when I could barely hear the Midwest well enough to work them. That’s really frustrating – I knew my paltry score of 500,000 points wouldn’t be even close to competitive this year.
I’ve finished in the Top 20 worldwide in previous years, so the station itself isn’t the problem. It’s the HF bands themselves. They favor anyone who doesn’t rely on a path over the North Pole to reach Europe, and that’s going to dictate performance in the major contests coming up over the next few weeks.
The CQ Worldwide Phone contest is Oct. 27 and 28, and then a month after that is the CQ Worldwide CW contest on Nov. 25 and 26.
If you’re in the West, being competitive will require two things: wringing everything you can out of 15 meters if it opens at all, and working Asia across the Pacific to help make up for what you will miss looking a Europe.
It would be so rose-colored-glasses of me to say access to Japan and the rest of Asia without a polar path makes up in any way for being able to work Europe cleanly, but it doesn’t even come close. The fact is, Europeans won’t likely hit California and vice versa unless there’s a little flurry of sunspot activity in the days before the big contests.
I mentioned 15M because at this point in the solar cycle that band is just about dead most of the time. But through late September and the first half of October this year, there has been some life on 21 Mhz. Not a lot of life, but I expect that in the CQ Worldwide contests – Phone later in October and CW in late November – we will at least have openings across North America.
This will be important to watch for, because 20M is going to be the money band where you’ll work the most stations, but you’ll want to work as many of those stations again on 15M while that band is open.
Getting your QSO count as high as possible is a good strategy in years when the number of multipliers will be depressed due to missing bands like 10M.
If multipliers are scarce, at least go for the highest rate you can find.
Experienced contesters will know this intuitively, but if you’re just starting out or haven’t been through a solar cycle minimum before, this information could be useful as we head into the big worldwide contests.
As always, geography is a major factor in contest performance. If the polar path is closed, it’s closed and nothing can make up for that. All you can do is maximize local or domestic contacts in places you can reach. For me, that will be the US, Caribbean and South American countries.
Years ago, I would have also added Japan to that list, but the number of active contesters in Japan has plummeted over the past decade. These wonderful operators have diminished to the point where the once-powerful Japan advantage for North American West Coast operators like me just isn’t there. We can never compete with the East Coast and Midwest access to Europe.
Tough beans, I guess.
The polar path doesn’t handcuff everyone, of course. On the West Coast, the further south you go, the less of an impediment it becomes – to Europe and to Asia. This weekend, I read the following report from Mark, K6UFO operating at NN7SS in Washington State not far south of me.
Mark noted he had some remote station trouble in the Makrothen, but “When it was working, there were some good QSOs, lots of JAs, South Americans and plenty of USA.”
I can concur with the US and South American propagation, but Mark’s remote station is located on Vashon Island near Seattle. That’s a couple of hundred miles south of me, and way out on the Pacific coast – obviously a great salt-water shot to Japan. I don’t have that, and Japan was all but invisible to me during the past weekend’s conditions.
For a bit more about what we can expect in CQ Worldwide contests, listen to Episode 13 – Chasing the action. We looked at the solar conditions during the September running of the CQ Worldwide RTTY contest as a predictor of conditions in late October and again in late November.
That’s it for Zone Zero. Thanks for listening. Let’s go get ‘em in the contests. I’ll see you out there.
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The fall contest season has begun. We got out of the gate in a hurry with CQ Worldwide RTTY – the granddaddy of radio teletype contests – and now we start a staccato rhythm of major contest weekends.
How are you plotting your course for the upcoming months to the holiday season? I’ll walk through my plan for fall 2017 activity on the contest calendar. Here’s a hint: It’s a very busy season.
That’s the focus for Episode 13 of Zone Zero.
Welcome to Zone Zero – the ham radio contesting podcast. This is Bud, VA7ST.
I have been very ambivalent about this fall and winter — as a radio contester I look forward to it like no other time of year, and yet this year I dread the conditions.
It’s going to be a tough grind through the very bottom of the solar cycle, and if you’ve been on the radio bands at all through the summer of 2017 you already know things aren’t what they used to be.
At this time two years ago, we were still in the hey-days of great radio propagation – things were only just beginning to drop off, but on any given weekend you could still fire up the radio on 10 meters and work big swaths of the world.
Not so much any more. Here in 2017, as we enter the always highly anticipated fall contest season, most weekends we will find 15M the highest workable band and 10M is merely a happy memory.
If you aren’t familiar with the 11-year solar sunspot cycle and how it affects ham radio, I encourage you to listen to several previous episodes of Zone Zero (Episode 1.1 – When things go horribly wrong — is probably a good starting point). I talk about the solar cycle a lot – because it is the most influential factor in determining whether the high-frequency radio spectrum will be usable at any given time.
For now, let me just acknowledge that we are nearly at the bottom of Solar Cycle 24. Sunspots are very rare these days, and it will be a couple of years now before we begin to see their numbers increase as we rise up into Cycle 25 and conditions start to improve.
The lower bands are less affected by low sunspot numbers – in fact, you may find 80M and 40M less noisy and long-distance or DX contacts could even be more frequent. Particularly in the winter months, during those long hours of darkness free from summer thunderstorms and atmospheric discharge noise.
But we will definitely miss the high bands – 10M and 15M. We probably will only see very sporadic domestic openings on 10M from now on, and 15M will produce fewer and fewer contacts even just in our own continent. From North America’s west coast, openings to Europe are now almost impossible on 15M, though I understand some brief magical openings have happened in recent days.
Generally, however, contesters will tend to gravitate to 20M during the daylight, and quickly move to 40M as late afternoon and evening arrive.
Overall, contest scores will plummet – in part because we will have fewer stations to work on a weekend, but we will also have dramatically fewer multipliers to work because entire bands are now out of the running.
Take 15M, for example. When sunspots are plentiful and conditions are strong, from the Canadian west I will work 60 or 70 countries with ease. But take Europe and Africa out of the mix because the trans-Atlantic and polar paths are closed, and I’m left with a smattering of Japan, Australia and New Zealand contacts to fill up the log beyond the work-them-anytime South American and Caribbean contest stations.
Well, that’s my reality for the next few years. But I won’t let it get me down. I know most of my competitors from this side of North America suffer the same fate – though the farther south you go, to California, for example, the better angle you have to work Europe without going through the heart of the auroral oval – which is the direct bearing from where I live.
I guess if it were easy, everyone would be doing this.
I have to remind myself that, no matter how bad conditions will be, we can’t change them by griping about them. We just get on the air and make the best of a lousy situation.
And I’m happy to report that there are a LOT of opportunities to make the best of this lousy situation from now through the end of December.
Looking ahead
I said we’d take a tour through the upcoming fall contest season, and that’s what we’ll do now.
First, the 2017 contest season really opened with last weekend’s running of the CQ Worldwide Radio Teletype (RTTY) contest. I didn’t expect much. In fact, I started the contest in low-power mode because I figured I wouldn’t put in much time anyway. Well, Friday night started out pretty good and I stayed in it through to the wee hours of Saturday morning, still running 100 watts.
But after a nice sleep, on Saturday morning when I got back on, I realized 20M was open to Europe but I’d need some power to punch through over the pole.
On went the amplifier, and starting at hour 18 – 1800Z – I began running stations. By the time I was done at 5 p.m. on Sunday – that’s the end of the contest – I had more than 700 contacts in the log, with more than 360 contacts and 44 countries on 20M, and more than 100 contacts on 15M – stunning for me at this point in the solar cycle. It showed me that there’s stll some useful life in 15M, but you have to be up there to find it.
Here’s my 3830 post-contest report
That was the CQ Worldwide RTTY. One month later, near the end of October, we’ll run the CQ Worldwide Phone contest (Oct. 27 and 28), and then a month after that, the CQ Worldwide CW contest (Nov. 25 and 26) – and that is my favorite contest of the entire year.
That one-month interval is important to note, because the very precise duration of solar rotation means conditions last weekend are an indication of what we can expect next time the same portion of the solar disc rotates into view one month later, and again the month after that. These days, the sunspots don’t change much from month to month, so the predictive nature of this phenomenon is pretty reliable. We can fairly confidently predict there won’t be many sunspots and band conditions will be soft, at best.
But with CQWW RTTY being pretty reasonable, I wold suggest things will also be pretty reasonable for the other two world-wide contests in October and November this year.
Now, CQ Worldwide contests are just three of the season’s highlights. There are a lot more.
I always enjoy the California QSO Party in October (that‘s Oct. 7 and 8). Whether you’re in North America or elsewhere, you’ll have fun chasing stations from all over the Golden State.
On October 15 and 16, there’s the JARTS RTTY – a world-wide (everyone works everyone) contest sponsored by the Japan Amateur Radio Teleprinter Society.
The ARRL Sweepstakes in November are fantastic – both the CW (Nov. 4 to 6) an Phone (Nov. 18 to 20) weekends are well worth getting on for. They offer massive participation and exceptional fun, though the long exchanges can be daunting for first-timers. Just stick iwth it, and after a few contacts, it will seem like second nature. I promise, it’s not as hard as it might look at first.
And another of my favorites on the annual calendar runs almost at the end of the year – The RAC Canada Winter contest is 24 hours of Great White noise on Dec. 30.
For those who like to get on for single-band operation, there are the ARRL 160M contest (Dec. 1 to 3) and the wonderful Stew Perry Top Band Distance Challenge closing out 2017 (Dec. 30 to 31).
That’s just a quick and incomplete sampler of what’s coming this fall and winter – and only up until the end of 2017. I didn’t even get into the Makrothen RTTY (Oct. 14 and 15), Worked All Europe RTTY (Nov. 11 and 12), and the Japan International DX contest that same weekend.
A whole host of activities also await us in January and the spring months, too.
Check them all out on the WA7BNM 12-month contest calendar.
Don’t let the solar cycle get you down. Keep your chin – and antennas – up and get on the air. There is so much fun to be had any given weekend, and I know you won’t regret a minute of the time you spend on the air with all of us.
That’s it for Episode 13 of Zone Zero.
Let your club know about Zone Zero, or jot a note about your contest experiences and leave a comment.
Thanks for listening. Now, let’s go get ‚em! I’ll see you out there.
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Our long, hot summer rolls along with plenty to do. Thanks for listening to Episode 10 of Zone Zero. This week we’ll have a post-contest report on the IARU HF World Championships held over the past weekend, and a look ahead at the next fun contests on the summer calendar.
Welcome to Zone Zero, the ham radio contesting podcast.
This is Bud, VA7ST, just recovering from the International Amateur Radio Union’s IARU HF World Championship.
Here at the ham shack, about 711 contacts are in the log from the big worldwide event on July 8, and the bands were in remarkably good shape – far better than most of us would have predicted.
I operated in CW-only mode, with the amplifier turned on for a little help. I ended up beating my scores from three of the previous four years, which tells me there’s still life left in the ham radio bands despite nearing the bottom of the solar cycle.
In particular, 20M was pretty solid to Europe from western North America for much of Saturday, and I made as much as I could of the opportunity.
Multipliers are ITU zones and IARU headquarters stations in each country. I found a lot more of them this year than last year, and finished with 237,000 points – up from 48,000 last year and 82,000 in 2015.
15M even coughed up a few contacts (no Europe, though) when there haven’t been many on 15M in IARU over the past couple of years.
I enjoyed some great runs on 40M including a brisk 150 in a row from about 0300 to 0500z, and also a nice steady run of 74 on 80M just after 0600z.
All in all, it was a fun day and I put in about 13 hours on the air, taking some nap breaks and going to bed at 1 a.m. local on Sunday morning, only to get up for the final hour of the contest from 4 to 5 a.m. local. I managed to add another 40 contacts on 80M and 40M, including attracting some loud Japan stations on 40M before the final buzzer went off at 5 a.m.
I sure hope you got on, and that you had as much fun as I did.
Now we look ahead to mid-July’s trio of contests – the Digital Modes Club (DMC) RTTY, the North American RTTY QSO Party, and the CQ World Wide VHF contest.
As I mentioned last time, I am a bit more excited than usual about the DMC RTTY and the CQ World Wide VHF contest.
This one is restricted to speedy 75-baud RTTY and PSK63 modes. Now that I have an Icom IC-7100 radio with built-in sound card, I look forward to taking it for a spin using PSK-63 and also seeing how it works on high-speed teletype using an FSK connection.
Multipliers in the DMC RTTY are every unique callsign prefix, but just once per prefix even if you work them again on another band. Things get underway at 1200 UTC on July 15 and go for 24 hours.
If you like a bit more rate than the DMC offers, there’s the NAQP RTTY, which runs for 12 hours on Saturday – but you have to take off at least two hours, leaving only 10 hours of operating time available.
The breaks must be 30 minutes or longer, so you can take two hours all at once, or a couple of one-hour breaks, or four half-hour breaks – lots of ways to slice and dice your off-time.
I will usually take the off-time in late afternoon and preserve as much evening time as I can for the lower bands.Multipliers in the NAQP are each state, province and North American DXCC country you work on each band. And don’t forget – this is a low-power contest to don’t use more than 100 watts.
Things get going at 1800 UTC on Saturday, July 15, and continue for 12 hours until 0600 UTC (which is 11 p.m. Saturday evening at this location).
The VHF contest is made for 6M and 2M operation on CW, phone and digital modes.
I have an 8-element cross-polarized 2M yagi – (that’s actually 16 elements, with 8 horizontal elements for the SSB/CW end of 2M and 8 vertical elements for the FM portion of the band) — but it is not in the air yet, so I will stick to 6M this time out, using the 4-element 6M yagi that is part of my Steppir antenna on the tower.
CQ WW VHF gets started at 1800 UTC Saturday, July 15, and goes until 2100 UTC on Sunday. You’ll be looking for as many maidenhead grid locator squares as you can work.
I am going to probably focus on 6M meteor scatter, using MSK144 mode on 50.260 Mhz as a calling frequency.
If you’ve never tried high-speed meteor scatter on 6M, give it a try. Just Google WSJT-X for the software and follow the directions for operating the MSK144 mode, most useful for high-speed meteor scatter contacts.
Listening on a calling frequency like 50.260 will allow you to hear signals pop up from nowhere as meteor trails allow signals from far over the horizon to be heard momentarily. It’s an addictive pursuit, though, so be prepared to get into it more seriously once you’ve tried it out.
There is a lot to operate this coming weekend, and I’m looking forward to finding time in each of the events we’ve looked at this week in episode 10.
If you don’t want to miss future shows, be sure to subscribe to Zone Zero on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or your favorite podcast platform. Tell your friends, and come back often for more.
Now, let’s go get ‘em. I’ll see you out there!
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Bud takes a look at the May 6-7 weekend QSO Parties for the 7th Call Area, Indiana, Delaware and New England states, plus the ARI International DX contest.
April’s behind us and it was a big month for QSO parties, with the Michigan, North Dakota, Ontario and Florida QSO parties.
Not to be outdone, May opens up with a bunch more so if you like to hunt around for counties you’ll be fully engaged this weekend.
This weekend we have one of my favorites — the 7QP, or the 7th Call Area QSO Party — but that’s just one of four state-based events starting Saturday. We have the Indiana, Delaware and New England QSO Parties as well.
So, get out the keyers, microphones — and maps — and go county hunting everyone.
The 7QP will have hams out from across eight states in the 7th call area — that’s Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona. And that’s a lot of hams and a lot of activity.
It gets underway at 1300 UTC Saturday, May 6, and runs until 0700 UTC on Sunday.
I sure love the 7QP but I never do well in it, because I’m just too close to Washington, Oregon and Idaho, though on 80 meters in the evenings I’m close enough that I can work just about anyone in those states, and it’s great fun to work the counties. And there are a lot of them across the 8 participating states.
I understand that two years ago nearly 1,200 stations in the 7th call area participated. That’s a huge number of stations you can expect to find in the CW, phone and RTTY bands over the 18 hours of the contest.
The exchange in this one is a signal report plus the two-letter state abbreviation followed by the three-letter county abbreviation. So, if you’re working a station in Arizona’s Apache county, that station would send you Alfa Zulu Alfa Papa Hotel — that’s “Arizona Apache.”
I think the hot tip for this one depends on where you are. For me, being so close to the Washington border that I could throw an Okanagan red delicious apple and hit the border, I’ll only manage a few contacts on the higher bands such as 20 meters, but as the day moves into evening I’ll start to hear and be heard on 40 meters and especially on 80 meters. I like racking up multipliers in the close-in states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana, picking up counties I just couldn’t hear on 20 meters.
For those in states further afield the reverse might be true. You’ll get the best signals on longer hops on 20 meters and maybe have less success on the low bands. But remember 40 meters and 80 meters can be really strong across the continent in the evenings.
So make sure you get on and see what you can hear.
The same advice applies to the other three QSO parties and I’ll quickly run through them right now.
The Indiana QSO Party starts at 1500 UTC on Saturday and ends at 0300 hours. The Hoosier DX and Contest Club which sponsors the contest advises that for 2017 county name abbreviations changed. So be aware of that and check the revised list on the Indiana QSO Party website.
Then there’s the Delaware QSO Party organized by the First State Amateur Radio Club. This one runs from 1700 UTC on Saturday and ends at 2359 UTC on Sunday. The state abbreviations changed last year so make sure you’re logging software is up to date the exchange to watch wars a single report and county. And if you’re an out-of-state station, send a signal report and your state or province, or “DX” if you are outside the United States and Canada.
A cool feature of this one is that it applies a power multiplier to your score.
If you declare in your log that you’re running more than 150 watts, you get a 1-times multiplier. For 150 watts or less, multiply your score times two. And for QRP stations running 5 watts or less, you can claim a 3- times multiplier. So that’s pretty neat.
And then there’s the New England QSO Party. Not to be confused with the Nebraska QSO Party, the New England event is often just referred to as the NEQP. I love this one, too, because it includes stations in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
The New England stations will send a signal report and state and county abbreviations. So, a Berkshire county station in Massachusetts will send Bravo Echo Radio Mike Alfa or “Berkshire Massachusetts.” And you can look up the county abbreviations on the NEQP website.
ARI International DX Contest
Rules for: non-Italian stations, in English | Italian stations, in Italian
And just so those that aren’t into QSO parties don’t feel left out, there’s a big international contest this weekend, as well. Sponsored by Italian hams, the ARI International DX contest is an all-mode, everyone-works-everyone event on CW, phone and RTTY.
Things get underway at 1200 UTC on Saturday, May 6, and run 24 hours. The rules are posted in English and Italian language versions on the ARI website.
The exchange for non-Italian stations as a signal report and a progressive serial number. Italians will send signal report and their Italian province’s abbreviation. I should point out that the ARI International has a short turnaround time for log submissions after the contest. They have to be submitted via a web upload — you can go to www.ari.it — and you have to do that by May 12 or your log might only be accepted as a check log.
There you have it a bunch of state QSO parties this weekend and a big ol’ international contest.
Here in southern British Columbia where I am, the lawns need mowing now that the grass is going so well, and so it’s “busy times,” but I’ll try and get on for a bit in each of these events and see what I can do at this part of the solar cycle.
You can read more about the podcast at zone.va7st.ca. Subscribe and tell your friends about the program.
73 from BC — thanks for listening and I’ll see you out there.
Additional resources
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On Saturday and Sunday, the bands were ignited by the Florida State QSO Party, or FQP. As the weekend (April 29-30) rolled along I took notes for this post-contest mini-episode 2.1.
Congratulations to the Florida Contest Group for 20 years of this great contest. It’s a fun one with lots of activity from Florida counties.
In this part of the solar cycle, during daylight the only band producing contacts was 20M, so that’s where I devoted my time and attention.
During and after a contest, I will often jot down notes about observations and things I could learn from for next time out. That’s sort of the point of this podcast about contesting. I’m making notes for myself, and I hope they’re useful to others.
I ran 100 watts, leaving the kilowatt amplifier turned off. In fact, out of the six years I’ve entered the Florida QSO Party since 2004, in only one year did I run high power – 2008, which also coincided with my second-highest ever score in this one, about 5,300 points.
It’s interesting to note that in 2011, with 100 watts I beat that score with nearly 7,600 points in the log. The solar cycle had improved that much by 2011, and over the six years since then the peak arrived in 2013 and we’ve slid down the other shoulder into the long, dry valley of solar minimum right now.
This time out, I finished with 38,500 points, 153 contacts and 63 counties in Florida. Time on the air was around 9.5 hours, spread out over many sessions
That might not sound like much, but those are all high-water marks from this station. In fact, it is a 500 percent improvement over my previous best score.
Saturday morning from British Columbia was very tough going into Florida. Stations were generally weak, and we had one-way propagation. They were pointing at the northeast and working the US northeast and Europe so stations in the W7 region got short shrift.
Makes sense to do that – I would, too, if I were in Florida. You have to go where the points are – finding the most fertile ground for your CQs.
Saturday eased a bit on 20M later in the day but it was never easy. 40M was no good from here on Saturday evening or Sunday morning.
But Sunday morning on 20M was fun for a couple of hours after local sunrise – from 6 to 8 a.m. Pacific — with signals from Florida strong for the home stations and workable rover stations moving as fast as I could keep up.
I have to thank N4EEB, who provided me with 20 counties. Other super-active rovers in my log included:
The really active rovers were spread out in a span just above 14.045 – smack-dab in the middle of the “rover window” from 14.040 to 050. I made a note of where we had worked before on 20M, using the band map built into N1MM Logger, and kept coming back to see if any of them had moved into a new county. It was a pretty good feed of new ones through the day.
If I couldn’t hear a rover on his parking frequency, I figured he was up in the phone band or on the move, and made a mental note to come back shortly to see what part of Florida he was going to activate next.
A little patience and persistence really pays off when hunting for rovers in new counties.
There were amazing stretches of rover activity when it was all I could do to keep up with them, they were all hitting new counties so quickly.
Special thanks to NO5W for the excellent rover station activity maps. They really worked well for tracking where a station was and where to expect them next. These and other great resources are linked from the Florida QP website’s Counties info page.
I spent many sessions waiting to get through to some stations – going 15 minutes or longer between contacts as I sifted through the signals already worked. That’s called “working out the band,” but as I have mentioned, if you stay with it or come back a few minutes later there will be new stations to work.
In a lot of multi-mode contests, where you can work CW, Phone or both modes, points are weighted in favor of CW contacts. In this one, a CW contact is worth two points, while a phone contact is worth just one point. And isn’t that just as it should be (he says with a smile). So, there’s a real incentive to head lower in the band occasionally to work the CW stations.
This was a great running of the Florida QP. I saw a 500 percent increase over any previous best score I’ve had over the years, and with low power, on bands that were horrible between me and Florida.
I think my major score improvement this year speaks highly of the in-state participation rate and, in particular, the rover activity that activated so many counties with workable signals.
Thanks for the contacts, Florida.
Keep an ear out for four more QSO parties next weekend. They’re the subject of the next episode of Zone Zero. Subscribe if you like these brief contest podcasts, and please consider going into iTunes and leaving a review to help get the word out.
73 from British Columbia.
Thanks for checking in. Now, let’s go get ‘em.
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Right off the top I want to remind everyone that you can email me at [email protected] with thoughts about the podcast. In each of the shows were going to take a quick look ahead at one or two of the upcoming contests and this week, it’s the Florida State QSO Party.
Out the window I can see green grass growing like a spring weed, the creeks are rising, birds are chirping, the shrubbery is budding out, the dog — Boomer the border collie — is out there with his squeaky ball and a frisbee, and he’s having a great time because spring is back here in the southern part of British Columbia.
Now springtime weekends aren’t really big contest weekends. Other parts of the year are much more contesting-intensive, so right now is the perfect time for getting out in the yard to check out your antennas, looking for things you need to repair after a long, hard winter and just getting the property back in shape for a much-anticipated summer. And I sure hope we have a great summer because we had one heck of a tough winter.
Coming up at the end of April is the Florida QSO Party.
Organized by the Florida Contest Group, this is one of the more well-attended state contests, where everyone around the world turns their antennas toward Florida and tries to work as many stations in as many Florida counties as possible.
The QSO party has two operating periods – the first is a 10-hour stretch from 1600 UTC on Saturday, April 29, to 0159 UTC on Sunday. Then everyone gets to take a break, before getting on for the second operating period, which gets underway at 1200 UTC on April 30, and runs through to 2200 UTC – for those doing the math at home, that’s another 10 hours of operation.
You can operate the entire 20-hour contest if you wish – and many will.
The exchange, if you’re not in Florida, is a signal report and your state, province or DXCC prefix.
Keep in mind that if you’re outside Florida, you only get points for contacting stations in Florida.
It’s a contest for CW Morse code or phone operators, with activity on 40M through 10M – it’s important to note that 160M and 80M aren’t part of this one, folks.
Checking the log for past years, I see that I operated the Florida QSO Party in six previous years – most recently in 2014. My best score was 5,200 points or so, having made 64 contacts with stations in 41 Florida counties. That was in just two and a half hours of operating and I finished something like 12th in Canada that year.
One of the fun things about state QSO parties like this one are the roving stations. These are dedicated – very dedicated – hams who drive around the state activating county after county.
That means there are often new counties to work as they day goes by. Just when you think you’ve found everyone on the air in a given hour, a rover may show up in a rare county and you’ve got another multiplier in the log!
One strategy I’ve found useful in this and other state QSO parties is to operate in shorter stints on the air, but keep coming back often.
At any given moment, there might be just 10 or 20 Florida stations active on 20M CW, and perhaps another 30 or 40 to be found up in the Phone portion of the band.
Depending on how close or how far you are from Florida you will probably be able to work most of them with relative ease. The in-state stations often call CQ, waiting for the masses of hams to find them. As you tune across the band, listen for swarms of signals on a frequency – the Florida station will likely be there underneath the callers.
After a few minutes of busy activity, you may find you’ve done something called “working out the band,” which means you’ve found all the stations active at a particular time.
But don’t be lulled into complacency.
Remember those rovers I mentioned? They’re moving – sometimes hitting a new county every hour or two.
A new county may be activated for only a few minutes if the rover is cutting though a corner of the county – you have to be on the air to hear them while they’re handing out the hot multiplier!
As always, for rules and links to the Florida QSO Party website and just about every other contest in the world, check the WA7BNM Contest Calendar.
73 from British Columbia, everyone. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you out there.
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