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Hey. How YOU doin’? If you’re a contest junky, here is another one that may get you fired up. It’s the 2011 New York QSO Party sponsored by the Rochester DX Association. Work the 62 counties of New York State for fun and awards. You can even sponsor an award as well.

Map Courtesy of RXDA

The contest runs from October 15th 2011 starting at 14:00 UTC until October 16th 02:00 UTC. 12 hours of contacts and exchanges. The RDXA has also instituted a new class of operator for the contest; Rookie. If you are a licensee who got their ticket on or after January 1st, 2008, you qualify for the Rookie class and be able to compete for a plaque if you have the best score. But this award can only be awarded once to an operator. So there is a show window of time to win this I would think. No word on when someone would be exempt from the Rookie class. But you can find all the rules on the website, as well as links for software to log with, and PDF versions of maps of all the New York counties.

There is also a web forum available again from the RXDA. It was closed temporarily because of excessive spam problems, but it’s back open accepting new users. But it appears to be a manual process so don’t expect a new registration to be approved automatically. I can sympathize with this one. There are a ton of spammers out there just looking for the chance to fill forums with their useless crap.

Anyways, as a New Yorker, it would be wrong of me not to mention this contest. Plus I just got the email yesterday and I was still looking for something to write about. SO call it fate of procrastination. Either way, it should be fun. Enjoy!

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, The Rock of Albany’s website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday on AmiZed Studios and hosts a podcast called The Kim & Rich Show with his fiance’ Kim Dunne.

The last 24 hours here in Upstate NY has been flood warnings and weather watches, and I want to get away from that for a bit. A good place to go, I think, is California. So why not join in on their 45th running of their QSO Party which is probably the largest in the U.S.

Image of Flag of California/Wikipedia

So the object of the party is of course to work as many stations in the Golden State as possible on phone and CW. Stations may be worked once per mode/band combination for points with California Counties (58 of them) as individual multipliers. And California stations will get credit for working stations inside and outside of the state with US States and Canadian Provinces as their multipliers. The party runs from 16:00 GMT October 1st till October 2nd at 22:00 GMT.

The Northern California Contest Club sponsors the CQP and offers a variety of awards open to stations inside and outside of California.  Some of the awards include plaques for the top operators in the Youth (under 18) and YL categories. California QSO Party chairman, Rick “Rhino” N6RNO, says that last year the contest attracted a record number of log submissions, and they are hoping to beat the previous record this year, by as big a margin as they can.

The rules for the contest, as well as a complete list of awards can be found on their website.

73.

Rich also writes a Tech blog and posts stories every Tuesday and Thursday on Q103, The Rock of Albany’s website, as well as Amateur Radio stories every Monday thru Friday on AmiZed Studios and hosts a podcast called The Kim & Rich Show with his fiance’ Kim Dunne.

Last week in the Linux in the HAM Shack chat room, we had a lot of participation from our listeners. It was so great to see everyone there. We hope that in the future, more people will get a chance to check out the live show. Check back here on the web site for the schedule of live recordings.

This episode of Linux in the Ham Shack is jam-packed with content. We have a special guest from around the Interwebs that you will likely know if you listen to other podcasts about Linux. The show did run a bit longer than usual, but there is just so much in it I couldn't begin to tell you everything you're going to hear. I do hope that you'll stick around for the entire episode because there are some goodies near the end that you will not want to miss out on, including how you can win significant cold, hard cash.

Thanks to our special guest, our live participants and to everyone who listens to the show. PLEASE, tell everyone you know about us, and that we're not just for amateur radio enthusiasts. Technofiles, geeks, Linux and FOSS addicts and just about everyone will gain something from the podcast. Oh, and due to a couple of technical problems, the audio quality in this episode is poor in a few places. I did the best I could. Next time it'll be better. Have a great week!

73 de Russ and Richard