I entered the North American QSO Party this weekend. I had every intention of being on the full 10 hours, but a few things got in the way, resulting in only 7.5 hours in front of the radio. A key issue was staying in the chair.
I currently have a contract project that calls for me to be in front of a computer a solid eight hours each day writing product descriptions for a website project. So the big problem was doing that all over again but this time with RTTY signals and responses.
I decided to enter at the QRP power level. I noted that the record was 402 QSOs. I managed to get to 238 QSOs with a fair distribution across all five bands. But at the end of the contest it was difficult to find stations that could hear me that I hadn’t already worked. I tried to do a run a few times but only picked up a couple of QSOs that way.
It was a fun contest. If you worked me, thanks for digging out my signal. Thanks, too, to a few of you who worked through my challenges clicking on the right info in the MMTTY window. That delayed my response and threw everything off. I must have been falling asleep on a few occasions.
March 16, update from preliminary results — first place in the QRP category. That’s exciting!
