This weekend was a busy one here in Ann Arbor. I got down to the museum, turned on the rig, tuned to 20m, and almost immediately started hearing stations in the Seventh Area QSO Party. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I regularly get sucked into contests like this.
Of course, I had to see how many of these stations I could work, even though we’re not really set up for contesting down at the museum. Over a couple of hours, I worked 24 stations in WA, OR, AZ, and MT.
Tuning to 40m, I immediately started hearing stations working the Indiana QSO Party. I worked about 17 of those stations before leaving the museum about 1 p.m.
Saturday evening, I got on the air at my home station about 2330 UTC. Right off the bat, I heard a bunch of Italian stations operating the ARI International DX Contest. I also heard some stations working the New England QSO Party. I was interested to see how well I was getting into Italy, but after making five contacts, I switched over to working the NE QP.
In 2006, I had the highest score from Michigan in the NE QP. I have the certificate to prove it, but in the intervening years, I either haven’t worked it or haven’t done so well, so that certificate is getting a bit dated.
Since I had the evening to myself, I thought I’d give it a try. Starting at 0015 UTC, and operating until about 0430 UTC, I made 50 contacts. I made about ten of those contacts by camping on a frequency and calling CQ NEQP.
The NEQP is one of those contests that has operating hours on both Saturday and Sunday, so at 9am Sunday morning, I was back at it. During the course of the day, I made 41 more contacts, bringing my total to 91. My claimed score is 7,216. Considering that I placed first in Michigan with a score of just over 3,000, I think that I have a decent chance of scoring first this year.
Overall, I had a lot of fun working the contests this weekend. We need to get a memory keyer for the museum, though. That would make operating these contests a lot easier.
Finally, I have some new “stations whose callsigns spell words” to report. I worked K7EAR in the Seventh Area QSO Party and W9JUG. I actually thought W9JUG was working the Indiana QSO Party at first, but he lives in IL. So we had a nice little ragchew before the band changed on us.
Matt/W1MSW says
Hi Dan. Our logs for NEQP are on my friends computer, but I’ll have to check and see if we have you in there. We were working under the call N1FJ. We decided to go portable up in Vermont to a more rare county that didn’t have any records set yet. Had a lot of fun using our antenna launchers to hang our antennas up in the trees and I learned a lot of new stuff about operating away from home. Thanks for participating in the NEQP, it’s only fun if someone is there to make a contact with. Oh and I logged K7EAR too and thought it was a great call as well.
Dan KB6NU says
I worked you guys Sunday morning about 1350 on 40m CW. Thanks for the multiplier!