This weekend there is another contest, AKA good reason to fire-up your wireless HF station. Whether learning or looking to improve your CW skills or a super CWop.
This weekend offers a fantastic opportunity to do that as well as Finnish off your Worked All States. the ARRL Sweepstakes contests are like Field Day except with a longer exchange. Like Field day the objective is to work all ARRL Sections and Canadian provinces.
The exchange is (NO SIGNAL REPORT) just a QSO Number, Precedence (see rules for your operating class), your callsign, the last two digits of the year first licensed, ARRL Section.
The contest starts at 21:00 GMT 5 pm local on Saturday but ends at 23:59 Sunday which because of the time change is 7 pm local.
A typical QSO goes like this:
CQ SS NJ1F
KB1W
KB1W NJ1F 123 M NJ1F 77 ENY
324 B KB1W 79 WMA
TU QRZ SS NJ1F
So if you are new or learning CW this contest especially good on Sunday afternoon when big stations are looking for a new QSO. (The rules limit to a single QSO per station during the contest) Sunday afternoon stations calling CQ will really slow down the speed to work you. Remember that most of the exchange is the same the only thing that changes is the QSO number! So if you copied all the Information from a previous QSO only the QSO number will change.
Complete rules are at WWW.ARRL.ORG website (however at the time of composing this email the ARRL websites are not responding) otherwise I would be able to post the direct link to the rules. Hopefully the site issues are resolved quickly¡¡.
Hope you get on the bands and experience some good propagation, and try CW.
73
Brian NJ1F
Sent from my iPad Pro
