Wednesday, April 9, 2025

WQ6X Wangles another WEIRD minor-Contest weekend

The 1st contest weekend in April is what I call a radiosport warmup weekend.  Of course, during any radiosport operation, we are often at the mercy of any weird Space-WX anomalies that make their way before / during / after the event weekend.

The weekend officially opened at 12:00z on Saturday, w/the Spanish EA-RTTY contest followed
up by the LA, MS & MO state QSO parties, moving to the Polish SP-DX contest beginning @16:00z. 
Unfortunately, poor propagation and excessive geomagnetic noise made working into Europe all but impossible.  NoT surprising, OM2VL came thru LOUD and CLEAR - he NEVER misses a QSO Party.

Poor instate Louisiana participation doomed the LAQP GiG from the beginning.  IOly ONE Ssb QSO made it to the LAQP LoG - 10-hours is just not long enough for a reliable communication path to the Southeast, especially, when the bands are as noisy as they were on April 5th / 6th.  The MSQP was not much better, altho at LEAST some W5 stations managed to populate the bandmap.  Similar to LAQP, the MSQP event ends just about the time propagation opens between the East and West.

While the MOQP GiG ends at 04:00z (Saturday evening), at least they give a 2nd run of the event Sunday morning, for an additional 6-hours.  Over a dozen 1x1 callsigns made it considerably easier
to identify them.  Several MO stations offered up three (3) counties for each QSO - how nice is that?! 

For these QSO parties, running QRP power required expert timing to slip the WQ6X callsign in during 
a suddenly quiet moment during pandemonic pileups.

For the EA-RTTY contest, much the same tactics were used.  However, to call CQ, the RTTY
tones associated with that call were recorded into Voice Memory #1.  Clicking the F1 key on the N1MM software in Ramona played out that memory flawlessly, in spite of any internet dropouts on
my end.  Then again, using the the F1 key on the sending end allowed repeat-loop CQ calling that can be interrupted at any time.  

Over 10-hours of operation, only 54-QSOs made it to the log, which, as it turns out, was
good enough for 2nd-place for USA.

DiD you work the LAQP, MSQP, MOQP or the EA-RTTY Contests?

Is WQ6X in YOUR LoG?


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