I was pleasantly surprised to see FT4TA QSO confirmed in LotW just a couple of days after I made it. That’s pretty unusual for a big DXpedition (I can’t imagine all the work there must be dealing with 100K log entires).
That puts me one confirmation away from my year-end goal of 900 Challenge points.
Guess things did work out correctly despite bad copy on my end:
So I think I worked FT4TA, Tromelin Island, on 24.910 RTTY. I say think because he had asked for a” WB4 WB4 WB4″, then when I replied, I saw “B4SON 599 WB4” then saw KB4SON TU FT4TA. Gad I hope he got the “WB4” part correct.
FT4TA pileups have been HUGE and honestly pretty disruptive. Part of the reason for the bad decode on my end was intentional QRM on top of FT4TA. I’m hoping that folks tire of that behavior in the next few days.
A LotW confirmation for a 80-meter CW QSO with 4L5O (Georgia, the country), just came in today. This was confirmation for a contact made in November of 2012. Maybe 4L5O just joined LotW, or perhaps he waits about 2 years to upload so that folks are encouraged to send QSL cards. Sometimes it can take a while.
This leaves me with 14 more confirmations needed on 80-meters for 5BDXCC. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to hear any new countries during the CQ WW Phone DX contest this past weekend. It was, however, a target rich event for 20/15/10 meters.
Six and counting (along with 17 M-Class Flares):
This morning marked the sixth X-Class Solar Flare erupting from Solar Region 2192. Amazingly enough, none of these flares have produced a significant coronal mass ejection, which is a good thing, as that area has been in a highly geo-effective position and a string of CME collisions would surely make a mess of our ionosphere and magnetosphere.
Since these are mostly X-ray events their impact is short lived, but rather severe as you can see from the D-Layer Absorption image below which shows 10 dB absorption at 10 MHz and 3 dB at 21 MHz. At 14:48, the estimated duration is 1 hour 22 minutes.
Taken an hour later at 15:48 UTC, the situation has improved significantly. The 10 MHz absorption is down to 5 dB, and 21 MHz is about 1 db:
Finally, things are almost back to normal after about 2 hours 45 min later (the D layer is energized by the light coming from the sun, so absorption is always present during the daylight hours on lower frequencies.):
So a large envelope from the ARRL showed up in the mail today. Not entirely unusual as I teach classes, and am a VE, plus life members, etc. However I wasn’t expecting anything.
Imagine my surprise when I opened it up and found the following inside:
That’s the advantage of living in a small sate — it isn’t hard to win from time to time.
One sure fire way to bust the barrier that prevents a bit of LotW activity is to draw a line in the sand and report out your current standings. I did that two days ago, and today things look a tad bit different:
Now DXCC is up to 212, but more importantly, Challenge is up to 889 (11 away from the year-end goal of 900), plus 17m has bumped up a notch too. This is all from TY1AA, Benin, and working them on 40-10m. I just did the OQRS thing and when they mean express LotW, they mean it — took them less than 2 days to process the request. Nice job Italian DX Team!
Several of my ham buddies (including one at the top of the Honor Roll), have described the DXCC process as easy to get the first 100, then more effort to get the next. They have warned me that after 200, things start to crawl. They are so right!
In the past two months, I’ve added 1 new country, 2 new countries for 80m, 3 new countries for 17m, and 12 new Challenge points, so I shouldn’t complain.
I’ve already met the goal I set for this year in terms of getting to 200 in DXCC. However I still have a way to go in terms of getting to 900 for the challenge. 80 meter DXCC is all I have left to complete 5 band, but I suspect I will get the 17 meter DXCC completed well before than.
Still slow progress is better than none, and there are lots of fun and rare DXpeditions coming up in the next few months.
A series of solar flares in X/M have really messed up the ionosphere. On top of that one Earth-directed CME struck about 12 hours ago and another larger one is due any moment.
I don’t recall seeing Attenuation levels this high, over such a broad range of frequencies in quite sometime. The D-Layer Absorption has calmed down quite a bit.
A bit later (almost local noon), the CME swept past earth. The Boulder Magnetometer clearly shows the event, and the GOES 13 Satellite reaches values I don’t recall seeing before in this cycle:
I was a bit surprised to find two QSLs arrived this morning at about 5 AM in LotW confirming contacts with W1AW/1 from Maine. This was the final state that I need for WAS W1AW/Portable.
LotW Confirmation of W1AW/1 QSO from Maine.
Oddly enough, despite the LotW confirmation, the ARRL Centennial QSO Party Leader Board still says Maine QSOs are “Waiting for Upload”. Must be a batch operation that hasn’t been updated yet.
From the ARRL Centennial QSO Party Detail page (Emphasis added):
All awards may be obtained by anyone who qualifies. There will be application forms that may be printed-out, filled-in and mailed to HQ, and there will be online application forms.
