No Phone. Looking Foward to RTTY.

Unfortunately things did not go as planned last Saturday as I had hoped to put in a good 7 hours of operating during the NAQP. I was forced to stay over at work for 4 hours, which really cut down my bread and butter band, 20M. By the time I finally got home, 15M and 20M were both closed and we were on to 40/80/160M. This meant going back and forth on 40/80M working whatever I could hear on my SteppIR BigIR.

Conditions were not great, as there was a considerable amount of noise I was continuously working to reduce. I am sure some of it is local noise that I have yet to identify. In 71 minutes I logged 31 QSOs and 19 mults for 570 points. Frustrating to say the least, as I was hoping for 200 Qs over the course of 7 hours and based on the time I did work, 200 would not have been out of the question. Guess there is always August to give it another shot.

As for this weekend, I am debating about participating in the BARTG RTTY Contest as I look forward towards February 13-14 and the CQ WPX RTTY Contest, which I am planning a FULL operation, hopefully without interruption. Out of 48 hours a single operator can work 30 hours. Would 1000 QSOs be possible? That equates to a 33 rate, knowing that I will run a frequency, which should give me a 50/60 (or higher) rate for 15/20M I think 1000 would be possible.

RTTY seems to be my best mode of operation with the 5-band hex beam for 10/15/20 and the BigIR for 40/80M. In 2009 I worked approximately 14 hours and logged 173 Qs, 17 CQ Zones, 55 DXCC entities and 56 states and provinces. I will look over the details of the contest from last year before I put forth any sort of expectations. So far I am will on my way of surpassing my goal of 5000 QSOs this year.