The CQ WPX RTTY contest was held a few days ago, and despite being occupied with other duties that apparently are, quote, “more important than sitting infront of that radio all day”, I logged 100 contacts on low power. This should ideally be tenfold that number, but I’ll get there next year.

The antenna used for this contest was an EFHW tossed into a tree. I’m working on a more permanent antenna solution, but for the moment this is what I had to work with. If that wasn’t challenging enough, I didn’t have my PA here either, so I ran barefoot with ~70-80 watts.

I’m working on a better contest setup at home, and will dive into the details on this topic a little later.

This was my first contest weekend of 2022, and I was taking it easy with the goal of attending the Baltic SSB contest only. This is a 80m/40m contest, and since I don’t have a good antenna for 80m at home I used the LA2T club shack and used the opportunity to QRO.

The Baltic SSB contest started out nicely, and I noted 134 QSOs. The propagation was allright and I can only blame myself for not logging more – the contest started early in the morning and I’m not a morning person.

Anyway, the contest was over and just for fun I decided to switch over to 10m in case the band was open. I usually do this by listening around 28.074 at first, in case any FT8 activity can be heard. If you can’t hear FT8, you sure as hell can’t hear SSB. To my surprise many stations were active. So many, in fact, that I decided to turn the knob to the SSB portion of the band and check if anyone was active there. What do you know, a few stations could be heard — but they all called “CQ contest.”

I checked contestcalendar.com and it turned out a short 2-hour German sprint contest was on, DARC 10m, and it had started just over half an hour earlier. I thought to my self, what the heck, might as well log some 10m while there’s an opening. It’s not everyday business to work the 10m band in January from mo location. Since they all heard me so well, I found myself calling CQ just a few minutes later. A pileup quickly appeared out of nowhere, and it just kept on going.

Interestingly though, and a bit counter-intuitively, a pileup isn’t necessarily synonymous with more contacts. In fact, it gets increasingly difficult as the pileup grows; catching a full callsign on the first try can be challenging. I logged 166 QSOs on the 10m band in the middle of a cold January month, and that was all the reward I needed.

The 10m band is full of surprises, so checking it every now and then is definitely worth the effort.

I joined my group, LA2T, for the CQWW SSB contest this year. Along with three other operators we logged about 2,500 QSOs as LN2T. We had some unfortunate communication problems and planned poorly, so our stations were unmanned for several hours in the middle of prime time, so we missed out on a metric tonne of precious log entries. At the end of the day it was a decent result and in fact turned out to be the all-time high for my club, in this contest.

The condx were so-so, but Sunday evening 40m opened up great for us and I managed to reel in a decent pileup. I pushed myself to an average of 7 QSOs per minute for a long period. That’s approximately 8.5 seconds per exchange — needless to say, my mouth dried out and my ears still hurt from all the QRM! It was worth it, what an adrenaline rush when everything just “works” and the points keep rolling in.

The next big test for LA2T will be CQWPX in March 2022, we’ll make sure everything runs smoothly by then.

This weekend I worked the Scandinavian Activity Contest (SAC) SSB on behalf of my club, LA2T. We were mainly two operators, with the exception of one extra guy helping out a few hours he had spare. Together we managed to log 972 QSOs for LN2T. My personal goal was 1000 in total, that’s close enough for me to call it a win.

All in all a good and fun contest, however I’m a little surprised and, to be honest, a little disappointed that there weren’t more Scandinavian stations involved. You could tell by the serial numbers returned by the DX stations; most reports were in the 40-50 range. I’m under the impression there weren’t many exceeding 100, and only a handful above 2-300. This could be explained by poor overall conditions for low powered stations. After all, our amplifiers got pretty hot running close to 1kW all the time.

Bad condx or not, we managed to log VK and ZA on 15m, ZL and BA on 20m which is a bit unusual for us and always bring a smile to our face. Even the 10m band surprised us with a couple of nice openings to EA8 and RA.

Just a quick update regarding the CQWW RTTY contest. I tried my best but many hours had to be invested in house chores and other miscellaneous family duties. You know the saying: happy wife, happy life. I managed to log 221 QSOs from my QTH, peaking 100W using an EFHW tossed up in a tree. If only I had a bit more time I could have taken advantage of the 15m openings and probably doubled my score. Oh well – next time.

RTTY contesting is quite enjoyable. Even though it’s digital, it requires a lot of operator interaction, unlike the FTx modes.

I also got a good chance at using my KL405V power amplifier again, after repairing it recently (link). I must say it’s now performing better than.. ever, I think. Even though I didn’t push it beyond 100W this weekend, I’ve done some tests on FT8 at 200W and it just eats it. I should be able to pull 400W SSB from this, so I might try that at the next opportunity.

This weekend I attended the WW Digi DX contest as LC1R and LA2T, as I were the operator for my club as well as myself. I managed to nail 65 QSOs with my own call (only QRV for a few hours) and 131 for LA2T. I only worked the 20m bands.

At first I thought this would be a contest where I’d scoop in hundreds of QSOs, but this takes more effort than you’d expect. Calling CQ is pretty much a no-brainer, but when almost everyone does the same not much is happening. So S&P is the best choice, really. However, it takes time, and you need to pay attention to avoid dupes.

Next weekend I’ll hopefully be able to attend the Russian WW RTTY Contest.

On August the 7th I attended the European HF Championship as LC1R, single-op, high power, SSB only. I used the LA2T shack so I had plenty of power and good antennas, and was able to work 20, 40, and 80 meters. 15 and 10 meters was just playing the greatest hits of The Whitenoise on repeat to me. In total I logged 436 QSOs, but I think at least 10% were “uuh… 59 001” so probably worth no points.

I had a run of about 8 hours from start to finish, and in the end I wasn’t able to hear any stations that I hadn’t already worked. At then end of the day I guess I did as good as I could have done, given the time frame and the working conditions.

Logs have been submitted to the contest committee, and I’ve updated QRZ.com and LoTW, so anyone who wants their QSOs confirmed knows where to look.

It was a fun contest, thanks to everyone who participated!