The 2020 Thirteen Colonies Special Event is in the books as I write this. The K2K New Hampshire Colony had a record year in 2020 for our state.

World Class Stations and Operators

Matt Strelow, KC1XX joined the K2K team this year. Matt’s superstation and he and his team of world-class operators enabled us to break some records in 2020. Our 2020 operator team included:

• AB1BY – Abby, Operating from AB1OC, Hollis, NH
• AB1OC – Fred, Hollis, NH (State & QSL Manager)
• AB1QB – Anita, Hollis, NH
• AC1DC – Jamey, Nashua, NH
• K1DLM – Dave, Operating from AB1OC, Hollis, NH
• K1GQ – Bill, Wolfeboro, NH
• K1QX – Craig, Operating from KC1XX, Mason, NH
• KC1IMK – Keith, Candia, NH
• KC1IML – Mark, Candia, NH
• KC1XX – Matt, Mason, NH
• KM3T – Dave, Operating from KC1XX, Mason, NH
• NE1B – Bill, Operating from Hudson, NH
• NN1C – Marty, Operating from KC1XX, Mason, NH
• W1FV – John, Operating from KC1XX, Mason, NH
• W3UA – Gene, Bedford, NH
• WA1Z – Bob, Operating from KC1XX, Mason, NH

All of the members of the 2020 K2K operating team are also members of the Nashua Area Radio Society.

A Record Year for K2K

The K2K Team made an amazing 22,696 contacts during the July 1 – July 7, 2020, Thirteen Colonies period! This shattered the previous event record for a single state of 16,092 contacts. We are hoping that this will be an event record when the final 2020 results are in. Equally amazing was the fact that over half of the K2K operators made over 1,000 contacts including some ops with relatively modest home stations.

Operations Breakdown – Bands, Modes, and DX

The team managed a fairly even split between voice (SSB) and CW contacts thanks, in large part, to the operators at KC1XX. A good portion of the 2020 K2K contacts also came from digital operations (4,528 QSOs via FT8/FT4) which made up 20% of the Contact total.

The 20m band was the most productive this year but we made contacts on all of the available bands from 160m up through 70cm. The 40m band was also a strong contributor. We had some amazing performance on the higher bands with:

• 60 contacts on 12m
• 410+ contacts on 10m
• 125+ contacts on 6m

This was the result of some solid Es openings during the event.

We set out to increase our focus on DX contacts this year and our approach resulted in some good results. We achieved great contact coverage in Europe and Japan as well as many contacts all over the world.

The 2020 K2K Team achieved a Triple-Play of Working All States in SSB, CW, and Digital modes and our team worked a DXCC with a total of 119 DXCC entities in our logs. Several operators on the K2K team focused on Japan and we worked a total of 168 JA contacts!

Some of our longest and most interesting contacts include:

• BA5AD in China
• E20WXA in Thailand
• EX8TR in Kyrgystan
• HL3GOG and others in South Korea
• VU2USA and others in India (5 contacts total)
• YC7YGR and YB2TS in Indonesia
• Many ZS’s in South Africa
• Many UA0’s in Asiatic Russia

The Station Highlights

K2K was fortunate to have Matt and his team operating from KC1XX this year. Matt’s station is among the largest and best equipped in the world!

Matt’s station is located in Mason, NH on top of a hill and his station sports 13+ towers with antennas and transmitters on all major bands. Matt added additional antennas for 30m and 17m to his station just for participation in the 2020 Thirteen Colonies Special Event!

Anita, AB1QB, and I operated our station here in Hollis, NH during the entire 2020 Thirteen Colonies period. The highlight of Anita’s operation was a tremendous pileup and run of DX in Europe on Tuesday evening. Anita also ran our digital station during the event.

I spent most of my time during 2020 Thirteen Colonies doing a mix of SSB and Digital. We had two transmitters on the air at our station and I was able to operate both simultaneously (one SSB and one Digital) when the pileups were not too big.

We used the N1MM+ Logger and other software during our 2020 operation here at AB1OC-AB1QB. An example of the digital station operating dashboard is shown above. We made extensive use of our Flex SDR platform and network computing environment here at our station as part of our K2K operations. You can learn more about the station here on our blog.

Several younger members of our Club operated our station remotely during the 2020 Thirteen Colonies period. Abby, AB1BY did some live streaming to during her operating times and we captured the image above during one of her live streams. Keith, KC1IMK also operated our station. We have been encouraging our younger members to operate in Thirteen Colonies to develop their skills as operators.

The story behind K2K’s success this year is all about our operators who used their home stations to contribute a good portion of our final contacts. It’s much more difficult to manage pileups and make many contacts from a smaller station with wire antennas and limited power. I want to especially thank our operators who put in the hard work from their home stations to help us make contacts – thank you!

QSL!

We have uploaded our logs to LoTW, ClubLog (OQRS), eQSL, and QRZ.com. We’ve already confirmed hundreds of our contacts online via these services. The paper QSL card requests are rolling in here as well. If you’d like to have a paper QSL card, you can find the needed QSL information on QRZ.com here. the simplest and quickest way to get a card for you K2K contacts is to use ClubLog OQRS. You can search our log on ClubLog below:

If you have an account on ClubLog, you can use ClubLog OQRS to order a K2K Card as well.

There is also a very nice certificate that is available for working one or more of the 2020 Thirteen Colonies. You can order your certificate here.

We have received about 1,000 QSL requests and we are responding to about 100-200 of these each week. If you sent a QSL request, please be patient. You’ll be receiving your K2K card in the next few weeks.

Operating Awards

All of our 2020 K2K Operators are members of the Nashua Area Radio Society. Our Team did very well and we are proud to be recognized as:

• • The 2020 Thirteen Colonies Top State with a record 22,696 Contacts
  • The 2020 Thirteen Colonies Top Club with 22,696 Contacts
  • K2K had the 2020 Thirteen Colonies Top SSB High-Power Operator, AB1OC with 5,171 Contacts

And In Conclusion…

K2K’s 2020 Thirteen Colonies operation included some great stations for sure but the real story around our success was our operator team. Everyone worked very, very hard to make contacts and our results demonstrate this. There was great teamwork with lots of collaboration to ensure that we did a good job of covering all of the bands, modes, and DX around the world. I am proud to have been part of the 2020 K2K Team!!

Fred, K2K/AB1OC