07/17/2024
St. Petersburg Amateur Radio Club
While Field Day “isn’t a contest”, for those that like to keep score, the December 2018 issue of QST has the 2018 Field Day results. The combined CARS/SPARC/UPARC event racked up a score as submitted with 1253 total contacts and a total score of 5180 in the 3A class (3 transmitters, club-portable). By way of comparison, among the other 3A class participants, that placed us 42nd in the country out of 304 entrants, 1st in WCF, 2nd in Florida and 5th in the ARRL Southeastern division.
The SPARC Contest Team is proud to announce they placed second worldwide and second in North America in the Multi-Op High Power (Single Receiver) category. This was for the Makrothen RTTY contest run from the SPARC station over the weekend of October 14th and 15th, 2017. 
Our second place score of 2,023,660 points represents the total distance (in Km) between our station and the 545 stations contacted during the contest. The average distance for each QSO was 3,713 Km/QSO. Congratulations to team members Tom W4CU, Paul KA4IOX, Bob N2ESP, Tom … Click for more
The SPARC Contester–under the callsign W4TA–ran the North American QSO Party Summer RTTY contest this past week. This is a short contest starting at 2:00 PM on Saturday and going only 12 hours until 2:00 AM on Sunday. We ran two stations full-time even with being short-staffed. One of our regular RTTY contesters, Scotty N4RI, sadly passed away this month. Since the exchange for this contest is Name and State, in Scotty’s honor, we sent Scott and FL as the exchange. We were also missing a few others due to … Click for more
The weather could not have been better. A little hot perhaps during antenna setup on Saturday but the customary Field Day rain storms stayed away. Not that it would have mattered too much this year. Field Day, ham radio’s open house, this year was a joint effort between the Clearwater Amateur Radio Society, St. Petersburg Amateur Radio Club and Upper Pinellas Amateur Radio Club. The event took place on June 23rd and 24th at the Clearwater Fire Training Center in Clearwater. The banners above show all three clubs … Click for more
If you would like to learn the art of radioteletype, aka RTTY, do we have a deal for you. The ARRL is sponsoring the North American QSO Party – RTTY. Starting on Saturday July 21st at 2:00PM local time, and running for 12 hours. We will be running two stations simultaneously at W4TA in class M2.
NAQP – RTTY is a fun contest as all stations are required to run 100 watts or less. This makes for a relatively even playing field, with advantages to stations with good antennas … Click for more