I had my first stab at contesting during the summer of 2022 by taking part in the Islands on the Air (IOTA) event at the end of July. Having only recently been licensed it was good radio operation experience for me and also a good way to increase the list of countries and territories I’ve had QSOs with. I only heard about that contest the day before, I was ill prepared, in fact there was no preparation at all, mistakes occurred, although I also learned by just taking part. Proper contest logging software is pretty much essential for competitions. I didn’t have any, so I had no choice but to manually type all the exchanged information into a log, then rearrange that information to a correctly formatted “Cabrillo” contest log for submission. During the contest I just answered CQ calls. With experience, I now know that a much higher number of QSOs can be collected if you call CQ. However, it was fun and I was hooked. Encouragingly, I did quite well and I received the award for third place in the ‘UK self-operated, intermediate licence’ section of the contest.
During early October, one of the members of the Paisley Amateur Radio Club, Alex GM7OAW, another keen contester, posted on our message board app about the up-coming UK/EI DX contest. I went online directly and printed out the rules. I cleared any plans I had for the weekend of 22nd & 23rd October and started to think how best to set up my station to efficiently take part in the contest.
The process of DX contesting involves exchanging information with any contacts made. This includes your callsign, a signal report and a serial number, starting at 001 and increasing with each new QSO. Additionally in this contest, there is a District Code, which is the first two letters of the post code of your QTH for UK and Irish stations. Once the operator who is calling CQ responds to your callsign, he or she will give you something like “59, 001, papa alpha”, you then offer your corresponding information. Non UK/EI stations do not give a district code.
Points are awarded for each station contacted, 2 points for each UK/EI or European station on 20m, 15m & 10m and 4 points for DX (non European) stations. Points are doubled if the contact is on 40m or 80m. Then the interesting part. The total number of different districts and the total number of different countries or territories are added together to form what is known as the multiplying factor. Therefore, if you have 100 points from your QSOs and they come from 20 districts and 10 different countries your score is 100 x 30, so that’s 3,000 points. The multiplying factor can make a huge difference to the total score once it starts to build up.
Logging software with a contesting facility is essential. Information must be noted for every QSO, and any automation to this process saves time and increases accuracy. The software allows the user’s information to be preset. It’s assumed both operators will exchange a 59 signal report, so those are preset too, the QSO number increases in increments of one each time you have a new contact and your district code never changes. The only data left to manually enter is that offered by the other station, callsign, serial number and district. In my case I still needed to manually log the frequency for each contact as I failed to successfully connect the control cable between the transceiver and the computer before the contest began, but ideally this should also be automated too. Another cool trick the software offers is, it will prompt you if the callsign you enter has been input previously during the contest, for example in green if the previous occasion was on a another band, which is acceptable, or coloured red if it’s on the same band, which is not. You don’t want dupes!
The contest began at 12:00 GMT on Saturday 22nd October. It’s generally assumed you start on the 10, 15 & 20m bands earlier and move to 40 & 80 later in the day. I started on 10m picking up stations in USA, Romania, Bosnia, Italy and three in Bulgaria. Then I switched to 15m which was also rather quiet, just picking up a few German and Italian stations. On to 20m and it was busy, Hungary, Switzerland, Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Slovenia, Norway, Portugal, France, Cyprus, & Poland. Most of these stations were worth two points but USA and Cyprus were valued at 4, as DX stations. By 15:00 I’d contacted 18 different countries, with the multiplying factor for any new points earned now being multiplied by 18. I jumped around the bands a bit between 15:00 & 16:00, back to 10 & 15 and took a look at 40m, one of the double points bands. I logged my 78th contact at 5 o’clock (16:00z) on 40m and acquired 4 points from Iain Muir, GM0V in Newhouse, Scotland, which was the first of three contacts with Iain during Saturday on 15, 40 & 80 meter bands. With my multiplying factor now at 30, this single contact was worth 120 points to me. The value of each new contact would continue to grow as the contest continued.
Following a break for dinner and to spend some time with my XYL, I'd use most of the evening racking up more points and plenty of new UK/EI district multiplying points with British & Irish stations on 40 & 80m. I ended the evening with a total of 155 QSOs and in excess of 30,000 points. Each new station contacted in the morning would bring in big points now. I planned to focus mainly on 40m by calling CQ and hoping for plenty more UK districts.
My operating position with Yaesu FTdx1200 working on 40m.
The final push was a straight stint from 9am till 1pm local time. I started on 20m CQ calling and picked up another 30 stations before moving to 40m where I’d more or less sit till the end of the contest. Then I decided to CQ call on 40. It took a wee while to find an available space on the band, but after checking the frequency was not in use, I concluded 7,190MHz was my spot. And off I went. It started slowly, having to call many times before being answered. Then a little less calling and more answering. Then several stations calling me at once. For the first time in my amateur career I had a choice of calls to answer. Normally I’d be on the other end of something like this hoping I was being heard. I’d always pick a UK or Irish station first or a country I’d not contacted yet as they potentially offered more points. This was great fun, very politely thanking them for answering my call, exchanging the key info, and wishing them good luck in the contest. Occasionally adding an occasional ciao, grazie! or danke before I moved to the next call. A quick glance at the RSGB 40m live DX clusters page showed my callsign was “trending” - crikey! Forty-six calls that morning brought me additional district codes and each of the calls added even more points, double on this band compared with 20m. My final call at just before 12:00z was with the Grampian Contest Club, GM5G. I gave him my final QSO serial number of 251 and he smashed that with his 1001. However he was part of a team and I was just a solo operator, or “single, un-assisted” as the rules refer to my type of station.
The software has a simple export function which writes a correctly formatted Cabrillo log file. This was so much easier than the ages I spent manually typing and checking my log for the IOTA contest. Once the file was created for the UK/EI contest, I uploaded that to the organiser’s site. At this point I entered other relevant information, TX power, high, low or QRP, I was low, 50 watts. Un-assisted, assisted, or a team entry. There was also the option to enter “rookie” if licensed for less than 3 years, which I did. My totals were 251 contacts made, making 756 points. 63 countries or territories contacted and 61 UK/EI districts, that’s a multiplying factor of 124, giving me a final claimed score of 93,744. Then I took the dog for a walk so we could both get some fresh air. It was great fun, but also quite exhausting to spend so much time in the shack with far too much screen time. Looking forward to doing it all again.
A quick look at the finalised results shows that I lost a decent haul of points during the adjudication process, actually over 21,000 points. I need to investigate this to see if I can reduce my losses in future. It may in part be due to 13 of my contacts not submitting their logs, and my 1 dupe, which I didn’t notice at the time of logging. Interestingly, the contest results’ page shows that 4932 stations took part in the contest, but didn’t actually submit a log to the organisers. One particular station which I contacted on 40 & 20m, IK3UNA, had 429 QSOs with other entrants but didn’t enter the competition themselves.
I’m very surprised to see I was the highest scoring un-assisted rookie! The 7th highest scoring Scottish station, 11th overall in the low power un-assisted category. 67th out of 464 entrants worldwide. I’m more than content with that.
Table is filtered to show only low power un-assisted stations.
I’ve just seen on the radio club message app that the CQ World Wide DX Contest is on next weekend . . .
