Announcing The Fort Wayne Radio Club monthly contest

Great news! The Fort Wayne Radio Club is thrilled to announce a brand new monthly contest! The VHF SSB/CW competition will feature a 30-minute, Two-Meter Classic Sprint. Check out the rules below.

The goal of this contest is fairly simple – to enforce weak-signal activity on the two-meter band. The sprints are taking place monthly, on the first Saturday of each month. Since it’s a “sprint,” it means that the contest is short and it last for thirty minutes (1300Z to 1330Z).

The accepted modes are SSB and CW only while the allowed band is two-meters only. If we’re talking about frequencies, the accepted ones are 144.050 -144.100 MHz CW only & 144.200-144.270 MHz SSB only. The exchange comes in the form of consecutive serial number and grid square and featured categories are Base (high-power, low-power, and QRP) & Rover (high-power and low-power).

You can find out more about the contest and its scoring system – just visit forum and get all the relevant info on the spot.

All the summaries have to be sent to AC9EZ (dfile13@hotmail.com) with info on callsign, total number of QSOs, and entry category.

The ham radio contests also feature base category rules. The definition of a base station in this case is a station that uses a permanent antenna system. Note the cross-mode, non-simplex, or digital QSOs are not permitted in this contest. This also applies for the dual-frequency CQ’ing. At any point in time, just a single transmitted signal is permitted.

Throughout the event, base stations need to operate from one grid square only and contacts may be established via any possible means of communication. Spotting assistance is permitted but no self-spotting is allowed. Keep in mind that stations can be worked once per mode, for instance, once on CW and once on SSB. With that said, rover stations can be worked once more in case the rover migrated to another grid square.

Stations with higher power are allowed to use ≥50 watts PEP while lower-powered stations are permitted to enable between 11 and 50 watts PEP. Also, QRP stations are allowed to use up to 10 watts PEP.

You can submit score summaries either through a filled out score summary form or in a text format. All score summaries are to be submitted to AC9EZ, at dfile13@hotmail.com or to Jim’s home address. You can spot it on his qrz.com page. Note that you mustn’t submit your log and submit only score summaries.