CONTESTING

Last month, I noted that contests from March through June of 2020 had shown an extreme rise in participation. This trend continued in July and August.

Table 1 shows the count of logs received in 2019 and 2020 for four popular summer contests, the RTTY, CW and SSB segments of the North American QSO Party, and the CW weekend of the Worked All Europe (WAE) Contest. New record high levels of participation were reached for all three modes of the summer North American QSO parties. And Peter, DL7YS, busy processing the WAE CW logs, noted “one thing we already know, the highest growth in submitted logs is coming from the U.S.”

Not only was activity up, but so was propagation on 10 and 15 meters, at least in the SSB leg of the North American QSO Party. Many stations reported hundreds of QSOs on 15 and 10. John Laney, K4BAI, writes “Who would have thought that 10 meters would produce the highest number of QSOs on all the bands?” after making 209 QSOs on 28 MHz.

License Classes and Contest Log Submissions

Which hams get on for contests? Is there a relationship between license class and contest participation? Can we use licensing data to help draw more hams into contesting? Is there a correlation between license class and modes used?

I attempted to accumulate some statistics to answer these questions by cross referencing contest “logs received” callsign lists against the FCC U.S. Amateur license database, I