2009 ARRL RTTY Round-​up! Too Long, Don’t Read!

I have a spe­cial fond­ness for dig­i­tal con­tests, espe­cially since N1MM log­ger takes the chore out of the thing. (note to self…blog Why-​I-​Contest). I set a few mea­ger goals for the contest:

1. Have the radio on for the entire 24 hours
2. WAS
3. Make 300 QSO dur­ing the period.
4. Keep my QSO rates above 20/​hour

Goal 1. Have the radio on for the entire 24 hours. I have been spent the hol­i­days recov­er­ing from a sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure so I haven’t really felt up to a marathon in the oper­at­ing chair. I proved myself much more healed than antic­i­pated, and was able to man­age the entire dura­tion quite comfortably.

Often real-​life inter­venes and keeps an op from con­tin­u­ing the entire time. Con­test oper­at­ing becomes more a time-​management exer­cise. I wanted to con­sider prop­a­ga­tion and when best to break/​sleep, which I did to my sat­is­fac­tion. I slept in a lit­tle bit on Sun­day morn­ing, but really only missed about 45 min­utes of the con­test period. In this one, an op may only oper­ate in 24 hours or less of the 30 hour period, and can take the off peri­ods in no more than two seg­ments. Basi­cally this meant that you enjoyed sleep for 6 hours between Sat­ur­day and Sun­day. I had noth­ing else sched­uled, so I was able to take my shot at run­ning this thing.

So I actu­ally made a mis­take and stayed in the con­test for too long on Sat­ur­day. I should have kicked off at 0600z but 80M was boom­ing! Noth­ing like work­ing EU on 80 with a wire and 100 watts! When I actu­ally looked at the clock it dawned on me I had just robbed myself of 40 min­utes at the end of the con­test. It came back to haunt me as I tried to achieve my other goals.

Les­son learned from this lit­tle error in judg­ment is to make sure to set time strat­egy in advance, along with con­tin­gen­cies in case things start hop­ping. Need to stay flexible!

Goal 2: WAS. Totally achiev­able but a bit like fish­ing. I am a lit­tle whis­tle of a sta­tion, and unlike the big guns I can­not hold a fre­quency and CQ and let the world come to me. I search-​and-​pounce up and down the band, and IF there is some clear spec­trum I will call CQ for a few min­utes. I do get calls, but when the rates drop down I get mov­ing again.

Recently it seems like Okla­homa is rarest DX. OK hams cer­tainly have more press­ing things than wast­ing week­ends on the radio I imag­ine. I can actu­ally count on North Dakota, Rhode Island, Mon­tana and Wyoming in the contests…there are at least one active hams in each of these states! This year OK called me twice dur­ing my brief CQing inter­ludes. Nice! That said, where were the Nebraska sta­tions? Again, they prob­a­bly had more sense to mess up the bands in a RTTY contest.

So, my time man­age­ment likely caught up to me. I bet you the if I had been on 80M ear­lier on Sun­day I would have nabbed that elu­sive W0 Nebraska station!

I had a blast from my lit­tle sta­tion in this contest!