Contests, contests and more contests

It's been a busy few months on the contesting front, both big and small. I'm never going to win anything, but as always, it's the taking part that counts...

CQ WW DX - SSB (as M4F)

Arguably one of the biggest multi-part contests of the year, and myself and Rick M1EAC entered as M4F - the Finningley ARS contest callsign. We had a good turnout from other club members, and managed 1,467 QSOs for a claimed final score of 1,107,072.

WAE DX - RTTY (as MXØHTJ)

Another multi-part contest, this time with RTTY. I had permission from Paul MØTZO to use the HamTests.co.uk club callsign of MXØHTJ for the duration of the contest, and I was joined by my housemate (and fellow radio amateur) Dan 2EØMEH. We suffered from a few technical problems - mostly earthing related, but also a dodgy power lead for the FT-897. Stiil, 284 QSOs gave us a claimed score of 167,580.

EPC PSK63 QSO Party

The European PSK Club's yearly BPSK63 QSO party was next. Due to other commitments, I only managed to work the contest for a couple of hours - late at night on both the Saturday and the Sunday. Because of the operating hours, I was limited to 80 and 40 metres, and to be honest my 80 metre capability is - for want of a better expression - a bit rubbish. A bit of a slog for sure, but I completed 66 QSOs for a claimed score of 20,352.

CQ WW DX - CW

Back to the CQ WW DX contest again, this time for the third - and final - part, which is with CW. I entered this alone, dropping in and out over the course of an otherwise quite busy weekend. 245 QSOs later, and a claimed score of 36,340.

EPC Ukraine DX

The second EPC Ukraine DX Contest. I was again ably assisted by Dan 2EØMEH, and despite some pretty terrible operating by some stations we managed a total of 172 QSOs.

ARRL 10 Meters

Finally, the most recent contest was this very weekend. Due to other factors (okay, alcohol) I only managed to work a couple of hours of the contest, and with it being 10 metres only I was at the mercy of the daylight nature of propagation with this band. Still, it's a mixed contest - both SSB and CW - so once the band started to close I switched to CW, which brought a few more welcome multipliers. In just over 3 hours, I managed 45 SSB contacts and 23 CW contacts - totalling 68 QSOs, and a claimed score of 7,826.

Previous contests

Back in October I posted about the Scandinavian Activity Contest's SSB section, in which I had 213 QSOs for a claimed score of 15,762. The results have now been released, and I was pretty happy (for once!) to see that I managed to only lose 5 QSOs from my submitted log, leaving me with 208 QSOs and a score of 15,392. I came 47th in the European Single-Operator Multi-Band Low-Power section, was the 2nd highest scoring English station, and the 3rd highest scoring UK station.

Roll on next year!