North American QSO Party - RTTY

Phil W6TQG invited me to come to his shack this weekend to operate the NAQP RTTY contest as a 2 radio, multi-op team. The two of us had a great time working the full 12 hours from 11am to 11pm side by side.

From the kick-off until about dinner, we used the HF yagi and the 10-15-20 triplexer. Phil had me operate 20m, since he knew that'd be where the action was, and he was right. He spent the afternoon moving around watching for openings on 10, 15, and 40m. I was working stations hot and heazy, both CQing (calling for contacts) and hunt and pecking (searching around for others calling), until 20m shut down around 4:30-5pm. For times, I was able to maintain a rate of at least a contact a minute.

Around dinner time, 40 and 80m opened up, so Phil took 40m and I 80m for the rest of the night. Unfortunately, Phil's 80m antenna isn't great, so I was only working CA stations until quite late in the evening, and only managed to collect 7 multipliers total for the band. Luckily, I was able to get quite a few local contacts, so it wasn't a total bust.

In case you don't know, each multipler means we worked a station in a different state or provence. You get additional mults for each band, so working the same station on each band is to your advantage. We worked quite a few different multipliers from Canada, and I worked one Mexico station. I also managed to work a station from Slovenia (East of Italy) on 20m, which was REALLY cool. I tried to work him again with my call sign (W6KWF), instead of Phil's, but he slipped into the noise again (about the fourth time since I started tailing him), and never came back. I also got very close to working a Spain station, but he slipped away as well.

Score:
Band - QSO count - Multiplier count
80m - 46 - 7
40m - 114 - 35
20m - 155 - 45
15m - 23 - 10
10m - 3 - 1
Total - 341 - 98

Phil's score from February ~ 25,047
Total score = 341 x 98 = 33,418

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