A million points, that is… As a tune-up for the CW contest part of Field Day, several operators of the SPARC Contest Group fired up the W4GAC station to have some fun in the CQ WPX CW contest. This is a 48 hour event where we try to contact as many other stations anywhere in the world. In this contest, the goal is to work as many unique prefixes as possible. To make ourselves sought after in this contest, we opted to use NY4I as the club call (there are only 26 NY4’s in the world as the FCC never issued anything but 2×1 NY4 calls).
Tom, W4CU, Tom NY4I and Scotty N4RI started at 8:00 PM on Friday evening and went through to about 4:00 PM on Sunday (we did break from 1 AM – 9 AM each night —-we are not spring chickens any more you know).
When all was said and done, we worked 802 stations for a total score of 1,005,206 points. We had a goal of 1000 QSOs, but as it became clear that band conditions on Sunday were not going to allow that, we opted to go for one million points instead.
We all had lots of fun. Thanks to Tom W4CU and Scotty N4RI for joining Tom NY4I with operating and a special thanks to both Bob N2ESP and Dave KR4U for opening the club station for us.
We are always ready to activate the station for folks to operate. If you want to use a great station to run a simple one person contest or a full 48 hour team effort, all you need to do is ask. We focus on teaching new people how to contest first, and the points and contacts second! Newcomers interested in contesting are always welcome. After all, surely the lot of us are not delirious and there must be something fun to this contesting stuff. You owe it to yourself to find out why we love it and what you are missing.
All photos by Bob, N2ESP.
