The 13 Colonies Special Event for 2013 has come and gone and I wanted to share our experiences as one of the Special Event Stations for New Hampshire. We operated for 6 1/2 days mostly on SSB Phone and some using Digital Modes. The response to the event was even bigger than last year with some 80,000+ QSOs being made by the 13 Colonies stations. The pileups during the first few days of the event were huge! We did quite well for New Hampshire completing over 6,200 QSOs. We also operated on all of the non-WARC bands that our station can support. The following are some statistics from our operations during the event:
Band |
Mode | QSOs |
160m | SSB | 51 |
80m | SSB | 214 |
40m | SSB | 1,651 |
CW | 1 | |
20m | SSB | 3,626 |
Digital (PSK/RTTY) | 329 | |
15m | SSB | 233 |
10m | SSB | 95 |
6m | SSB | 18 |
2m | SSB | 5 |
Grand Total |
6,223 |
K2K Operations From Our Station – QSOs By Band And Mode
We worked all states in the US including Alaska and Hawaii, several US territories and some DX. The DX participation in the event was quite good and this enabled us to work stations on all continents across the world.
There are always many memorable QSOs during an operation like this and this year’s event was no exception. Some of the QSOs which stand out include those with young operators and operators who made their first HF QSOs ever. I also had an operator from Guadeloupe (FG4NN) respond to my CQ calls on 6m as well as several stations in Japan calling in during my digital operating sessions. We also encountered several /AG folks (operators who had recently upgraded to General Class). The QSOs on the Top Band (160m) and on the 6m and 2m Bands were also special as these bands are less commonly used during the 13 Colonies Special Event. Most everyone that we talked with was very appreciative of the event which is what makes doing something like this so much fun!
We will have quite a bit of QSL work to do along with the other 13 Colonies Stations and this will no doubt bring back more good memories from our operations last week. Thanks to everyone who made the 13 Colonies Special Event a success this year. We are already looking forward to 2014.
– Fred (AB1OC)