Posts Tagged ‘awards’
SOTA Sloth
June 29th, 2013 | 
Author: So, I was very pleased to come home yesterday and my SOTA Sloth award was in the mail box. As I have written, I am having a lot of fun with the Summits on the Air (SOTA) program both chasing summits and activating them as well. The SOTA Sloth award is for getting 1,000 chaser points. Summits are assigned a point value from 1 to 10,so for each summit contact made, the chaser gets credit for the points assigned to the summit..
The awards are very nice and each is a little unique. They are made of glass are called Ice Blocks. The certificate if authenticity that comes with the award reads:
The weekend
The weekend was busy, with lots of stuff to do in order to get ready for Mother’s Day, as well as actually celebrate it. Even though I did not have much radio time, I did manage to get some time in behind the K3 and some good things happened.
The first good thing to happen this weekend was a package that arrived through the mail on Saturday:
Yes – my JARC Antenna Launcher Kit arrived through the mail. Thanks you Joplin Amateur Radio Club! This is going to be a tremendous help with portable operations this summer.
Late Saturday afternoon / early evening, shortly after my weekly Echolink ragchew with W3BBO, Bob sent me an e-mail, letting me know that 15 Meters was wide open and that he had worked Z81X in the Republic of South Sudan. I had just finished washing the floors, so I put down mop and bucket and ran down (literally) to the shack. Sure enough, there was Z81X on 21.030 MHz, working split and sounding louder than all get out. The pile up was tremendous! So following my tenet of when the pile up is fierce and it’s a new one, to “Work ’em first, get ’em QRP later”, I turned the K3 up to 85 Watts. After a half hour of chasing, I landed them in my logbook. Z81X was like one of our wiley Foxes in the QRP Fox hunts in that he kept moving his listening frequency. Once I established the pattern, and inserted myself in his path, it just became a matter of time. Bob worked Z81X at 23:08 UTC and I got him a mere half hour later at 23:38 UTC. Bob checked the on-line log this morning; and yep, we’re both in there. Sweet – a new DXCC entity for both of us!
Then today, I got some time this afternoon behind the dial and got two more new DXCC entities, and these I worked at QRP power. 15 Meters was hopping and netted me UN3M in Kazakhstan, as well as RI1FJ in Franz Josef Land. The pile ups in these two instances were very small, so I tried QRP from the get-go here and was richly rewarded in both instances. When the competition is not so fierce, you can afford to “be a purist”.
There was another station that I worked on 15 Meters that caught my ear, as it was a long and strange call sign – LZ1876SMB. I have worked Bulgaria many times with QRP, but this was a Special Event Station to commemorate the Bulgarian Saint Martyrs of Batak. A little Googling revealed that these were 700 members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who were martyred for their faith in an uprising against Ottomans in 1876.
If you go on QRZ, you’ll find out that LZ1876SMB is just one of many stations that will be on the air commemorating the Bulgarian Saints. For us Stateside ops, if we work five of these different LZ Saints Stations, a very beautiful diploma can be earned.
One down – four to go. I am going to keep my ears open for these stations. Bulgaria is usually (although not always) a fairly easy trip from NJ via QRP.
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!
The 2012 log book……….
| 2012 | 100 | 500 | CW: 100.00% Phone: 0.00% Data: 0.00% |    |
| 2011 | 49 | 258 | CW: 100.00% Phone: 0.00% Data: 0.00% | |
| 2010 | 25 | 170 | CW: 100.00% Phone: 0.00% Data: 0.00% | |
| 2009 | 10 | 192 | CW: 19.27% Phone: 0.00% Data: 80.73% | |
| 2008 | 45 | 495 | CW: 36.57% Phone: 0.00% Data: 63.43% | |
My contacts for the year were 500, I thought it was a lot more but there were times I would forget to log contacts. BUT I almost doubled my contact total from the year before of 258. Seems I have to get away from the soldering iron and on the rig more!!
I was able to make it into 23 CQ zones
Some of my highlight contacts were Gibraltar, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Jordan and ST. Pierre & Miquelo.
Finally I was able to better my 1,000 miles per watt distance to 45,869 miles per watt with a QRPp contact to HA8JV with 100mWs of power.
Does the early bird get the DX…it’s said he gets the worm.
I did not check the propagation that morning so there could had been a storm brewing or maybe everyone but me was in bed sleeping. As I have blogged about in the past I am trying to get my ARRL Diamond Challenge award (and doing it QRP) at this point I am at 81 DXCC contacts. You only have one year to accomplish this goal and it's now almost December!!! Having said that I am "really" at 95 DXCC's for 2012 according to Club log. The catch is the ARRL for the Diamond award is not counting ALL DXCC on the list. It is a long story but it's just how the ARRL perculates. I was hoping to bring my K2 or my newly acquired KX3 to work as I was wanting to get some operating time in before work. I am usually in around 5:30 in the morning and I have until 7 to make some contacts. With my Saturday mornings performance I am not to sure if bringing the rig would be a waste of time.....any ideas out there???
Happenings over the last few weeks
D3AA from Angola: I had seen for many evenings D3AA on the spotting networks, I found either there was a huge pileup trying to contact him OR he just was not there even after laying in wait on the frequency for 15 minutes or so. Then one evening as I was looking at my Elecraft P3 pan-adapter, I noticed a signal to one side of the frequency I was monitoring. I spun the VFO and to my surprise it was D3AA calling CQ!!! He was just above the noise and I could copy him fine so I called and he came back to me first call with a 559 and he is in the log.
UPDATE....I UPLOADED THE WRONG SOUND FILE....ALL IS GOOD NOW.
Here is an audio sample from my K3 of a DX-pedition operating split ( calling on one frequency and listening on another frequency) using the main and sub-receiver. You can very clearly hear the pileup in one ear and the DX in the other ear...you have to have some headphones on to hear this. There is a point were a station is calling on the DX's calling frequency.
This is just but another feature of the k3 that allows me to snag DX-peditions and add them to my DXCC count.
Hendricks 41dB attenuator built and added to the mix
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| Hendricks attenuator in service |
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| Final testing |
Now when I want to use the attenuator it's a matter of selecting antenna B on the K3 and Ant B selected on the DTS-4 and I am ready to go with all the setting on the K3 done.
- Have fun and enjoy!!
- Look for DXCC's I do not have so I can add to my ARRL Diamond count.
- See if I can beat my miles per watt record of 45,868 miles.
- Have fun and enjoy!!
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| Some of the extra parts |
