Anita (AB1QB), Scott (NE1RD) and I had the opportunity to serve as site managers for the WRTC 2014 competition site in Hollis, NH. Our site was one of 65 sites in New England USA (and the only on in the state of New Hampshire). This gave us a chance to be part of the WRTC 2014 event and to meet some of the competitors, referees and the event organizers. WRTC has been called the “Olympics of Amateur Radio” because it brings together the very best Amateur Radio Contesters in the world to see who is the “best of the best”. Here’s a summary of what WRTC is all about from the WRTC 2014 Website:

“The World Radiosport Team Championship (WRTC) is held every four years and consists of 50+ two-person teams of amateur radio operators from around the world competing in a test of operating skill.  Unlike most on-the-air competitions, all stations are required to use identical antennas from the same geographic region, eliminating all variables except operating ability.”

Each competitor must qualify based upon results in selected contests over a period of 3 years. There were a total of 63 teams which participated in the event. It is a tremendous achievement just to qualify for WRTC. Each qualifying competitor selects a second person to make up their team. The competitors at our site were Julio Henriquez, AD4Z and Dan Thompson, W4UH. Our referee was Alex Orlov, RW4WR from Russia. We really enjoyed getting to know Julio, Dan and Alex. The stories that they shared and the information and tips they gave us a relatively inexperienced contesters will stick with us forever.

 

The WRTC 2014 competition was held on July 12-13, 2014 as part of the IARU HF World Championship contest. A great deal of effort was put into selecting and building 65 competition sites for WRTC to ensure that they were as equal in terms of propagation, antennas and configuration as possible. WRTC provided all of the antennas/feedlines, generator power and a tent for each site and each team of competitors supplied their own radios and supporting station equipment.

Preparations for WRTC 2014 have been in progress for several years now including planning sessions, station and site tests, team formation and training. All in all, the event is a tremendous planning and logistical effort. Doug Grant, K1DG was the leader and chief evangelist for WRTC 2014. Doug and his team did a tremendous job in making WRTC 2014 happen.

Our part of the WRTC experience began with the pickup of the station kit for the Hollis, NH site on the Wednesday before the event. The station kit consists of a 40 ft Rohn 25G tower, beam/wire antennas, feedlines, generator, tent and miscellaneous equipment.

Ed, K2TE and our “beam team” were at the Hollis, NH site bright and early on Thursday morning to put up the tower and antennas. The heart of the WRTC 2014 antenna system is the TX38 Tri-Band Beam which was designed for WRTC 2014.

Here’s a picture of the assembled beam and tower ready to be pulled up and into place at our site.

The picture above shows the tower going up. The Falling Derrick System that was developed for WRTC is quite ingenious and it raises the 40 ft tower and beam antenna with very little effort. Each beam team was specially trained in the use of this system to ensure safe setup and takedown of the tower and antennas at each site.

While Ed and the team took care of the tower and antennas, Scott, Anita and I setup the tent, generator, feedlines and “crew tent” at our site. The picture above shows the completed site ready for our competitors.

Julio, Dan and Alex arrived at our site after the site drawing at WRTC headquarters on Friday and proceeded to setup and test their station. As you can see, they brought quite a sophisticated setup! They used Ten-Tec Orion II radios, a microHAM band decoder and antenna switching system and PCs running the N1MM Logger to create a modern, state of the art multi-two contesting station at our site. WRTC competitors used a variety of different radios to compete in the event. You can find a summary of the radios and software used by the competitors here. The Elecraft K3 was the most popular transceiver and a combination of the Wintest and N1MM loggers were used most of the competitors.

The WRTC 2014 organizers did some custom design work to facilitate the event. Shown above is the WRTC monitoring system. This system is used by the referee to monitor the power levels of each operator’s radio to ensure that the 100W WRTC power limit is not exceeded. The referees can also monitor the audio from each operator simultaneously and a recording of these audio streams for the entire contest period is also made. All of this is done in the interest of ensuring a fair contest and for judging purposes as needed when the event is complete. A device also monitors the logging streams from the competitors computers to create a live, real-time scoreboard on the web. The scoreboard uses an innovative data collection method developed by Dave Pascoe, KM3T and Bob Raymond, WA1Z to “sniff” the logging information being exchanged by the competitors computers. The data extracted in this way is fed via cellphone data connections to the WRTC headquarters to update the teams scores on the web in real-time during the contest.

On Saturday, just before the competition began, Alex our referee opened the sealed envelope which contained our site’s callsign which was W1T. As with all things about the event, the callsigns were not disclosed to the operators until just before the contest began to ensure that none of the operators specific callsigns were known to others.

Once the contest began, our team was all business. Julio is shown above operating CW. He is an amazing operator and can easily operate at 40+ WPM speeds!

Our site was one of the public access sites for the event and we had quite a few visitors from the press and local HAMs who were interested in seeing what WRTC 2014 was about. The event also received quite a bit of media coverage, some of which can be viewed here.

An award ceremony was held at WRTC HQ the following Monday to announce and recognize the winners:

Medal winners

Gold K1A 7,184,844 points

Daniel Craig, N6MJ – United States
Chris Hurlbut, KL9A – United States

Silver W1L 6,816,144 points

Rastislav Hrnko, OM3BH – Slovakia
Jozef Lang, OM3GI – Slovakia

Bronze W1P 6,421,383 points

Manfred Wolf DJ5MW – Germany
Stefan von Baltz DL1IAO – Germany

Award winners

Highest SSB (with >35% QSOs on CW)

K1M (IK1HJS/I4UFH) SSB – 2063 CW – 1233

Highest CW (with >35% QSOs on SSB)

N1S (LX2A/YO3JR) CW – 2391 SSB – 1302

Highest Multiplier

K1A (N6MJ/KL9A) 436

Best Accuracy

W1P (DJ5MW/DL1IAO) 1.0% error rate

The final results were very close with only 118,425 points separating the 3rd through 5th place teams. To give you an idea of how close this really was – only 6/10 of a multiplier or about one minute of operating time separated the 3rd and 4th place teams! Some of the operators achieved peak rates of over 300 contacts per hour. This is very impressive considering that Field Day style stations with 100W output were used by the competitors.

Our  WRTC 2014 experience was a very memorable one. It was a great combination of amazing people, the best contesters in the world, great application of Amateur Radio technology and some of the best logistics and organization of a large event we’ve ever seen. Truly an Amateur Radio experience of a lifetime!

– Fred (AB1OC)