Tuesday, July 18, 2023

WQ6X Racks one up for RAC Running QRP (no less)

For 24-hour radiosport contests, after All Asian and Field Day is a relaxing favorite approach
to officially kicking off the Summer Radiosport Contest Season.  What made THIS RAC GiG so unique was WQ6X's decision to run this iteration at the QRP power level.  I have run nearly a dozen radiosport events @QRP power-levels this year, most recently being the CQ Weird Prefix (WPX) contest in May and the All Asian Cw GiG during the weekend before Field Day.

For WQ6X, the Canadian RAC GiG qualifies as a domestic contest, making a QRP-run more
effective overall.  During last year's RAC GiG, not enough attention was made to calling "CQ RAC".  This year, not only was it a good idea, calling CQ allowed advertising the QRP state by sending:
"CQ RAC  WQ6X  WQ6X/QRP.  On Ssb, I verbalized the QRP in the F1-Key CQ message. 
This approach worked in other contests and worked equally well in this more-or-less domestic Canadian GiG (altho we can work anyone anywhere).

Thanks to the 3-element Stepp-IR and 2-element Shorty-40 Yagi's (@ 55'), dozens of callers
had a hard time believing I really was QRP, until they looked of my posted score on the
3830 Scores website.

This year, the multi-OP Operation for the San Diego Contest Club happened by running our usual
multi-Single Operation from WA6TQT's Anza location however we used the N7NR callsign for a different kind of change.

While Canada is the main focus in the RAC Contest (10-points per contact w/Canadian stations),
non-Canadians are worth 2-points each.  That means we can actually get QSO-credit when Billy-Bob (and his brother Barney) call-in out of their usual boredom (Bore-dumb?).  Additionally, we score
20-points for every Canadian RAC station in the log.  Being a mixed-mode contest, we can receive double QSO-credit for contacts made on BOTH Cw and Ssb.

When it was all over, it would seem that WQ6X took a 2nd-place in the QRP category while N7NR took 1st-place for the non-Canadian Multi-Single category.

Running QRP was difficult enough to accomplish on Cw, running Ssb as well seemed to be more difficult than I would
have liked for this GiG, relegating this RAC entry to a Cw-mode only.

Running as N7NR, we took advantage of the opportunity to run Ssb as well as Cw, although with the periodic pulsing internet dropouts, slipping a voice exchange in between those dropouts was sometimes a tricky timing event.

Nevertheless, the RAC Canada Day GiG certainly brought us a lot of next door neighbor radio activity.

The play around in our CQP and we play around in their RAC GiGs (Summar and Winter).


DiD YOU work the Canadian RAC contest?

How many VE and VE-RAC stations are in YOUR Log?


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