NAQP Contests

[KF7ORO]

I had a few hours free yesterday and played in the NAQP RTTY contest. It's only the 2nd time I've participated in a contest and I'm not really that serious about contesting and not interested in sitting at the radio for 10 out of 12 hours but the NAQP contests seem to be a good way to pick up some states if you're interested in WAS or just testing out the performance of your station.

I was able to log 82 QSOs and if all get confirmed I picked up about a dozen states I hadn't worked before. I'd pretty much only need ND, SD, and some New England states for WAS. That was with 20-50 watts on AFSK RTTY using my 20' high horizontal loop antenna on 20, 40, and 80 meters.

The NAQP CW contest is in 2 weeks (Aug 4th) and the NAQP SSB contest is in a month (Aug 18th).

http://www.ncjweb.com/contestcal.php

[KF7ORO]

Just a little follow-up. About half of my contacts have already sent LOTW QSLs. I had about a 30% QSL rate on LOTW just in casual operating. These guys don't seem to use eQSL as much though.

I'm still hoping for a couple more states to come in but just got the QSL for AK this morning.