ARRL Centennial Celebration Logo

I was fortunate to operate as one of the W1AW portable stations as part of the ARRL Centennial QSO Party again this past week. The first time the state of New Hampshire was on, I was only able to devote a limited amount of time to this operation. This time, I was able to set more time aside and operate about 4 hours on each of 6 of the 8 days that W1AW/1 New Hampshire was on the air this past week. During this time, I was able to make 1,925 contacts averaging a little over 120 QSOs for each hour that I operated.

The table above shows the final stats for my operations as W1AW/1 NH this past week. I mostly concentrated on the SSB Phone mode with a bit of RTTY operations on the last day. As one would expect, 20m and 40m were the most popular bands.

I encountered pileups on all of the days that I operated with the largest ones being on the first evening on 20m We had a significant solar CME event during the operation and subsequent Auroral activity which created some interesting band conditions. In particular, almost all of the 10m and 12m contacts were done on Thursday and Friday evenings using backscatter propagation. I was unable to hear much with my antennas pointed at the folks that I was trying to work on 10m and 12m so I tried pointing the beams directly south to test backscatter propagation. I also asked the folks in the pileup to do the same. This mode of operation resulted in about 350 QSOs on 10m and 12m! This was also great news for the close-in stations as this mode of propagation allowed folks in adjacent states to work New Hampshire on the higher bands.

It was great fun operating as W1AW/1 New Hampshire this past week. I wish there would be another chance to do this but we’ll have to wait awhile for the ARRL’s next big birthday to come around.

– Fred (AB1OC)