You don’t have to look at all the numbers. Numbers can be horribly boring. They’re only “fun” for number crunchers like myself. But in this case they do prove that the new beam antenna works.
Jason KF5EJX (*) and I (K5WW) participated in not one, but two contests the last weekend of September. All in all we logged more than 650 QSOs, and we weren’t even trying!
It’s a bit irritating; but for us Texans who happen to love RTTY contesting that last weekend is always a bit of making a difficult choice: exactly how many hours do we spend on the CQ WW RTTY Contest, and how many in the Texas QSO Party? With sparsely populated counties like Uvalde we are always in high demand! But… the CQ WW RTTY is lots of fun too! Dilemma, dilemma…
Luckily, we didn’t have to make that choice this year. With only one (and a half) radio available at the shack we just made the most out of it. Period.
While the RTTY contest starts at 0000Z on Saturday we didn’t really get started until around lunch time (local) on Saturday. Jason had “the Saturday from hell”, then installed some more/new antennas in the back of the shack. I had to go to San Antonio on Friday afternoon so I couldn’t go that Friday night. But I did stop by the shack and make the first few QSOs. Sorry, I couldn’t resist! 😉
Anyway. Once we were up and running we had our hands more than full!
So how did we do in the TX QSO Party? Not too shabby! 200 QSOs were logged, with 34 states and 2 Canadian provinces:
And, not shown in the image above (but it did happen!) we made a few QSOs with other operators in other countries too, who were chasing TX counties.
The CQ WW RTTY Contest was even more fun! 452 QSOs in the log:
And a whole bunch of countries we never would have contacted with one of those G5RVs:
Lots and lots of US states and Canadian provinces too:
And CQ Zones, a must-have in this contest:
So other than big fun, was anything else gained, you ask? Sure was!
We worked about a dozen new DXCC entities. I made a screen shot of our ARRL LoTW DXCC standings page before uploading the new logs; and it looked like this:
KN5S DXCC standing before CQ WW RTTY / TX QSO Party
A few days later it looked like this:
KN5S DXCC standing after CQ WW RTTY / TX QSO Party
So that’s 8 new confirmed DXCC entities. Getting close to our first DXCC award!
And our Worked All States count went up too. Here’s the situation before the log upload:
KN5S WAS standing before CQ WW RTTY / TX QSO Party
And the situation a couple of days after the upload:
KN5S WAS standing after CQ WW RTTY / TX QSO Party
Doesn’t look like much; but we’re getting real close to that 5 band WAS award!
And you guys (and galls)… missed all of the fun!
Yeah, I’m a sucker for numbers…
(*) only 11 more months to go, bud 🙂