Success in the NAQP RTTY!

Success! That is how I saw the 3 hours and 43 minutes I was able to participate in the North American QSO Party RTTY Contest yesterday. I missed the first 5 hours of the contest because of work, but was anticipating getting home and firing up the FT-1000MP (Thanks N6RO!) in search of contacts. My hopes were high because of the recent changes I had made in the shack. I had checked and rechecked connections, power levels as well as configuration of the rig, interface and software. All seemed correct and were when I arrived home. Unfortunately, I did not have any luck at all trying to remote in from work to make a few contacts, but that didn’t matter much.

I started off quickly on 20M and made some rapid contacts early on and was really excited when I was able to filter out heavy noise or adjacent signals using 500Hz for the 2nd and 3rd IF filters. I spent some time at work reading up on the rig, as it is a rather steep learning cycle, considering what it has to offer, but with my limited time in front of it, all was working well.As 20M started to slow after sunset I made the move to 40M and it was average in terms of contacts. I was hoping for a stronger showing on 40M, but I had many times were the receiving station had troubles hearing my signal or worse yet, did not hear me at all. That was the case with the ARRL HQ Station, W1AW. The operator, “Hiram” copied my call and asked for my name and state numerous times. I might have lost their response in the QRM, but I logged the call and sent an eQSL. So hopefully this was a valid contact.

I am sure I could have started on 40M earlier, but didn’t as I usually have better luck on 20M. After making a few passes over the band, I attempted 80M. I had no previous activity on 80M since transmitting on that band would disconnect the home network from the Internet. Can’t have that when my wife is addicted to WoW, can we? Thankfully I sent my call sign many times on 80M to an assortment of different stations in the US. Yet the only contact I made was from Santa Cruz, here in California. At least I was able to log my first 80M QSO using any mode.So, while my logged contacts was not all that impressive at 72 I did consider my participation a success. I made 41 contacts on 20M, 30 contacts on 40M and 1 contact on 80M for a total of 2,952 points. I have already uploaded my results. Now to fill out my logbook and send out QSL cards.