Anita (AB1QB) and I (AB1OC) recently participated in the 2013 CQ WW RTTY Contest. Band conditions were fairly good and we had some fun experiences in this contest. We entered the contest in the Multi-Operator, Single-Transmitter (Multi-Single) High Power category with a goal of finishing in the top 10 in North America.
One of us was on the air for almost the entire 48 hour contest period and we managed a final claimed score of a little over 2.7M which will hopefully allow us to achieve our goal for this contest. We were active on all 5 contest bands with the best results in terms of both QSO counts and multipliers on 40m, 20m and 15m.
We again used the excellent N1MM logger along with both the MMTTY and 2Tone decoders. The use of multiple decoders really helps to get callsigns and exchange information correct. Using multiple decoders to process received transmissions (plus the built-in decoder on our Icom IC-7800 Transceiver) gives a 3-way vote on decoded QSO information.
We focused on working into Europe and Asia/Oceania in this contest as these two regions provided the maximum QSO point value and were both very active in the contest. As you can see from the above spot, we had a very strong signal into Europe and Western Asia which helped generate many QSOs while running. We also worked quite a few contacts in Japan with a total of 120+ QSOs with operators in Japan during the contest.
We both had a great deal of fun during this contest and were very happy to post our best score yet in a contest of this type. We’ll be anxiously looking forward to the final results when they are available.