I hadn’t planned on entering the WV QSO Party this year because I thought that I had another event on Saturday. Then, scheduling shifted around and the weekend opened up. Having recently participated as a rover in the Indiana QSO Party, the car was still set up for mobile operation. Further, I had a hideous showing in last year’s WVQSOP, so I was hoping to redeem myself this year.
I did the planning late on Friday afternoon. After grabbing the current rules and a list of WV counties from the event website, I headed over to an online county mapping tool. Between that and google maps, I plotted a loop through the northeastern part of the state, concentrating on reasonably large roads that crossed county borders, but not over a river. I didn’t have much time, so rather than obsess about the route as I usually would, I just took the first candidates, without optimizing for elevation, signs of power lines, and so on. The route is saved as a google map. On that map, if you select a way point and hit “directions”, the map provides the long/lat for the way point. I programmed those coordinates into a dedicated GPS, having learned last year that my android phone does not do well as a GPS once I’m a few miles into West Virginia, and out range for my (and sometimes any) cellular network.
For the record, here are the waypoints, each of which turned out to be a reasonable operating location:
| County Line | Latitude | Longitude | Range to next |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jefferson-Berkeley | 39.319575 | -77.98796 | 19 mi |
| Berkeley-Morgan | 39.445992 | -78.198828 | 44.4 mi |
| Mineral-Hampshire | 39.465354 | -78.714981 | 38.5 mi |
| Grant-Hardy | 39.13016 | 79.037683 | 124 mi |
The weather looked great on the morning of the event. Even the space weather looked not half bad. Solar flux had been drifting down, but it was around 100 and most importantly, quiet. I left around ten in the morning, hit the bagel shops on main street in Fairfax, and made it to the first way point at noon. It took a few minutes to set up the antenna and get sorted out, and the first contact was recorded at 12:15 local, fifteen minutes into the contest. From then, I operated non-stop until the closing bell at 10 pm local.
My main antenna was the 40m hamstick, but I also adjusted the screw driver to 20m and used it from time to time to test the waters on that band. I alternated between CW and phone throughout the day. I hovered on each location for at least an hour, and spent the last three hours at Grant-Hardy. I was surprised that I got so few contacts at the Berkeley-Morgan stop. It seemed ideal — the top of a mountain, a nice place to pull over, and no obvious sources of electrical interference. Maybe it was propagation or time of day, but as soon as I started driving again through Morgan County, I started picking up more contacts.
Here are the statistics for the day:
| Band | Mode | QSOs |
|---|---|---|
| 3.5 | CW | 26 |
| 7 | CW | 181 |
| 7 | LSB | 71 |
| 14 | CW | 16 |
| 14 | USB | 10 |
| TL | ALL | 304 |
So…what’s my score? I’m not sure. The contest rule do not fully describe scoring, but refer to a summary sheet. QSO points are weighted, CW counts more than Phone and contacts with mobile stations are also more valuable. There are bonuses to work the official event stations (I worked them ten times), plus bonuses for number of counties activated (11 — see the map). Speaking as a mobile operator, these incentives to work rover stations are very appreciated. Looking over the logs from past WV QSO parties, I’m surprised that more stations don’t enter in the mobile category given the scoring algorithm. Anyhow, part of the scoring method seemed ambiguous for me, so before I do any totaling, I’m waiting for some clarification from the contest organizers by email. At least I am sure that I did better than last year.
From the perspective of fixed stations there is a bonus for working the same mobile station in five counties. By my reckoning, I provided this credit to:
| Call | Contacts | Counties |
|---|---|---|
| K4BAI | 11 | 7 |
| W8POF | 10 | 7 |
| K8JQ | 7 | 5 |
| KB3AAG | 6 | 5 |
| KQ3F | 6 | 5 |
| W2CVW | 5 | 5 |
Looking through the log, I worked 27 US states, plus Ontario in Canada, and one station each in Germany and the Slovak Republic. As in the INQP, I think I would have done better had I been able to get a 20m antenna into the trees, but operating this contest single-handed, I didn’t want to take the time to wade into the brush and grapple with ropes, wire and coax.
It was a great day for a contest, and while I was driving frantically around West Virginia, I was also enjoying the scenery. My final location was on a mountain top, where I watched the sun set. Around dusk, a family of deer walked through the clover and grass next to the car. By the end of the event, the stars were out in full force and I started at the constellations for a bit…
…which was helpful, because for the last mile of the trip, my GPS stopped functioning normally. The road that I was on was a shiny new highway, and evidently not in the memory of the Tom Tom GPS, that I had purchased in 2009 in Belgium. The GPS constantly tried to recalculate where I was, as it could not accept that I had driven the car off a farm and up into the woods on the side of a mountain. Taking bearing from Polaris, I headed east until I found a road that my mildly brain dead GPS recognized, and made it home about two hours later.
County and state maps were generated using the Do-It-Yourself Maps tool.