CONTESTING

A record-high 3,717 logs have been submitted for the March 2021 ARRL DX Phone contest, with many contesters noting the poor propagation that weekend. I operated at the W3LPL M/2 effort for the contest at the 15-meter band position, and in very brief openings we worked only 21 European stations the entire weekend. The operators at ED1R noted in their 3830scores.com writeup, “very bad propagation this year. No 10/15 (meter) QSOs.”

The March propagation doldrums were felt by the experienced operators in the 2021 Russian DX contest as well, but newer operators were overjoyed with the intense activity. “This was the first Russian DX Contest in which I participated”, writes Marija, YU3AWA, shown in Photo A. Marija operated as a 20-meter-only entry. “I still can’t believe I’ve done more than 250 QSOs in less than two and a half hours! I’m impressed! Of the total number of QSOs, 200 were with stations from Russia.” Welcome to contesting, Marija.

Multi-Distributed Debut

Ten entries were received in February for the new WPX Multi-Distributed category. Beginning in 2021, all three modes of the WPX contest (RTTY, SSB, and CW) have a new category, “Multi-Transmitter Distributed,” allowing geographically distributed stations all using the same callsign. There is the usual requirement of only one transmitted signal per band at any point in time, but in the distributed category, the geographic spread of equipment and antennas is limited only by the requirement that it all be in the same CQ zone and country.

Of the 10 Multi-Distributed logs submitted for 2021 WPX RTTY, I find the