A team of newly licensed club members came together to enter the 2016 ARRL Rookie Round SSB Contest. We held a training session at our QTH the weekend before the contest to allow our operators to learn about contesting and to become familiar with our station. We put together a training package to introduce the operator team to contesting in general and to the ARRL Rookie Roundup. You can view the training package here.
We entered the ARRL Rookie Roundup in the Multi-Op, Single Transmitter category using the club’s N1FD call sign. This gave everyone a chance to operate in the contest and to contribute to the team’s final score. Fred, AB1OC spent some time setting up and checking out our station ahead of time. Our operators used the N1MM+ logger and operated using 100w of power on the 20m and 40m bands.
Abby and Her Dad Jamey Operating in the Contest – Abby has a Bright Future as a Contest Operator!
We had a total of 13 Nashua Area Radio Club members who attended the preparation session and/or operated in the contest. Folks worked as teams during the contest with one person operating while another person logged. Our operators had nice pile-ups to work for a good portion of the contest. All of our Operators did really well. As you can see and hear from the above video, we definitely have some future contest stars in our club!
| QSOs | Points | Multipliers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rookie QSOs | 66 | 132 | |
| Non-Rookie QSOs | 214 | 214 | |
| States | 40 | ||
| Canadian Provinces | 4 | ||
| DX (1 allowed) | 1 | ||
| Total Multipliers | 45 | ||
| Final Score | 15,570 |
The table above shows the results of our operations during the 6 hour contest period. Our team did really well! Of particular note is that they were able to work 45 of the 70 available multipliers. It will take some time for the ARRL to put together the results for everyone in the contest but we believe that our team did very well.
We are planning to host recently licensed club members again for the ARRL Rookie Roundup RTTY and the ARRL Rookie Roundup CW contests later this year. We hope to see many of our operators back again for these contests.
Anita (AB1QB)
