Last weekend i entered my first radio contest, the European PSK DX contest. As i never contested before i didn’t really know what to expect or how well my station and i myself would perform.

The days leading up to the contest i prepared my station, tested if everything was setup right and edited some macro’s. I was planning to go for a ‘Searching and Pouncing’ approach, hunting for CQ calls, i made sure to have to the point macro’s.

As a novice, i could only utilize the 20m band mentioned in the rules:  http://www.eupsk.com/eupskdx/eupskdxrules.pdf . Lucky for the dutch novices like me, there is also a 20m-only category to contest in.

As this weekend was also formule1’s monaco GP weekend, i didn’t plan to compete all hours that were available in the contest. I would use this one as a first benchmark. So, after dinnertime i started searching for the first contacts. This was a lot easier than expected. I got into a nice flow and made a lot more contacts than i had ever before, this i liked a lot :p

After sundown it became a bit more difficult so i took a break. Returning into the contest later on, i managed to contact a station in the USA as the OM’s there were waking up. This was the first contact at the other side of the ocean for me! Shortly after a Canadian and another american contact followed.

On sundays i woke up late but managed to put in a few more contacts just before formula 1 started and the closing of the contest. Then i had a few difficulties exporting the results into cabrillo format as HRD didn’t export the exchange information correctly. I managed to get the correct fileformat by exporting it to ADIF+HRD and then convert it with a logconverter.

Logs can be uploaded up until upcomming weekend. I expect to end up realy low, if not last, because i didn’t realy had enough time to put into the contest (because of the formula1).  In the claimed results however, i’m not deadlast so the final results might surprise me :p I consider myself winning anyways because i managed to contact the other big continent for the first time during the contest!

Looking forward to the next one 🙂