North American QSO Parties and Worked All Europe DX CW Contests Provide Mid-Summer Opportunities
July and August offer multiple interesting opportunities to sample mid-summer propagation. Last month, ARRL Field Day, the IARU HF Contest, and CQ’s own World Wide VHF Contest were highlighted here. Don’t forget to get on the air for the last two, which are held during the middle of this month: July 13-14 for the IARU HF competition and July 20-21 for the CQWW VHF contest. Last month’s column has details and links.
If you can’t sleep the night before the CQWW VHF, here’s an idea: See how many Russian Radiosport Team Championship (RRTC) stations you can work. Top Russian contesters will compete multi-single style as teams located in the field using special callsigns, similar to last year’s World Radiosport Team Championship (WRTC2018) in Germany.
This competition is on a smaller scale than the WRTCs, but it was from these annual Russian contests that the WRTC designed its Field Day-style operations when the event was hosted in Russia back in 2010. Activity will be for just eight hours, from 0700 through 1500 UTC on Saturday, July 20. Everyone except the Russian competitors should follow the IARU HF Championship rules and use any of the logging programs for that contest. The CQWW VHF and NAQP RTTY QSO contests begin three hours later, so there’s no conflict.
Later in the month, the Radio Society of
