WQ6X Kicks-IT with Kentucky - ALMOST

State QSO parties all alone on a lonely weekend are all to often an unfortunate situation. 
With weekends like Cinco-de-Contest in May, if one particular event turns out to be a DuD,
there are at least 3 or 4 others to keep me amused.  Bottom-line: When the event is the only
thing happening in a weekend, it had better be GooD.

My purpose here is NoT to single-out any QSO Party in particular, only to point out that more radio amateurs should participate in their own state QSO party, demonstrating to the rest of the world how WONderful their state is.  Now admittedly I make this point from the viewpoint of the California QSO Party (CQP), the largest and most successful of all the individual state QSO parties.

Admittedly it takes a LoT to produce a state QSO party.  Production also includes promotion. 
NoT only do WE out-of-state operators need to know about your event, your in-state operators
need to know about it, encouraging them to get on the air and put their particular county on the radio.  Operators who are also county hunters, rely on multiple occurrences of each county on the radio.

A BiG mistake made by many state QSO party operations is that they are WAY TOO SHORT. 
The Kentucky QSO party is a perfect example of this.  This year, the KYQP ended at 01:00z - the event was a mere 12 hours.  By the time the QSO party event was over, 40-meters was barely open to Kentucky, and, 80 & 160 meters hadn't opened yet - period.  Stations in Alaska and Hawaii don't stand a chance on any band below 20-meters.

While it is true that band conditions truly SUCKED on Saturday, that is what amplifiers and gain-antennas are for.  Many QSO parties schedule a 2nd part to their event on Sunday, giving everyone
a 2nd chance at making QSOs, making up for poor band conditions on Saturday.

This weekend also hosted the first International Digital contest.  While the KYQP allegedly allows for RTTY contacts, there were none to be heard.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that there were NUMEROUS Kentucky stations operating the Digital contest, while stranding their own QSO Party (if those operators even knew about the QSO Party in the first place).

Evidently the Kentucky QSO party does not make the distinction between single-mode
(Cw, Ssb or RTTY) and lumps all the stations into a FIXED category; one for HP, one for LP and one for QRP; that is, if the 3830-scores website is representative of things. 

We KNOW participation is lacking when
Axel (KI6RRN) only makes 9 QSOs from
the WA6TQT super station (with it's stacked horizontal arrays for the high bands and Vertical arrays for 80 & 160).

I checked 10-meters several times throughout Saturday and even put out a couple of CQ calls on that band with no results.  On other bands,
I copied KV0I/NE (Nebraska) calling CQ KY because there were hardly enough KY stations calling CQ.  

 

Unfortunately, I didn't hear KV0I scoring any callers - Bummer Dewd.  There's more to Kentucky than just horse racing, altho, in order for us outsiders to know that, we need for the Kentuckians to share those things with us outsiders.

I make the above comments not to TRASH Kentucky, rather to point out how important participation is during a state QSO party.  In order for participation to be most effective, the event rules should be designed to attract the maximum number of participants possible to the event (in-state and out-of-state).

DiD YOU participate in the KY QSO Party?
How many QSOs are in YOUR LoG?