contesting

ARRL DX CW is over for another year. I was working all weekend, and could only find enough time to work the tail end of the contest tonight. In any case, it was a blast and actually made me feel a little better about the sunspot situation. Without much effort, I worked most of Europe on 100W with ice-damaged antennas.

With CQWW CW approaching in mere hours, I thought it might be prudent to post some of the "golden rules" for winning contests. These rules are applicable for any station, any category, and any contest.

1. STAY IN THE CHAIR! You aren't making points if you're in the hottub or walking the dog. Remember the equation: butt+chair=points.

Randy K5ZD, WPX contest director, announced that preliminary rules for this season will change the multi/single class to a true single transmitter class. Although I do not believe the new rules have been made 100% official yet, I would imagine they will stick. After all, it is about time the multi/single category actually was a multi/single category.

The Glorioso DXpedition has taught us all a valuable lesson: being a good operator is a rare skill. I don't say this because I think I'm a good operator, rather, I say this because the massive pileups contain a lot of hams who are, frankly, awful operators. We don't make new hams pass a code test anymore, so the least we can do is make sure that we enforce proper operating techniques. I don't mean to enforce it during the pileups; we need to start much earlier. The easiest way to do this is to be a great operator, and eventually people will emulate it.

A few months back, I agreed to serve as the 40m phone bandcaptain for the Hampden County Radio Association (W1NY) in this year's ARRL Field Day. Now, 40 is not my favorite band and phone is certainly not my favorite mode, but I figured it might be fun. I started preparations already, since Field Day is this weekend. This is my fourth or fifth time serving as bandcaptain over the years, so I'll be posting some ideas and tips from my own experiences over the next few days.

Preparation tips for FD:

Spent the weekend at K1TTT's place for the Alabama QSO Party. N0HI SOHP mixed, scored just over 11,000 raw. Anyway, here are some of my thoughts on this QP...

• Lots more activity on CW than SSB
• Quite a few counties I missed on both modes
• I had to call "CQ AL" a few times...not many AL stations calling for whatever reason
• Only heard N4PN a few times...I wonder how bad he kicked my butt

Look for my score and a better breakdown later this week. Follow my up-to-the-minute stuff on twitter, as always. 73', gud DX.