Spring has hit us with full force in southern British Columbia. This is Bud VA7ST, and I’m sitting here with a bit of a sunburn from my first couple of days of full warm sunshine and looking forward to the next six months of outdoor activity.

Operating in a contest often means giving up big chunks of a sunny weekend in favor of fun on the radio. It’s quite an investment of time, and if there’s anything we can do to make that time  even more enjoyable and less isolating, it’s worth doing.

We toil away with purpose during a long contest weekend but – at least for single-operator unassisted  categories – we intentionally avoid sharing details about where we are making contacts or whom we have found on the air. But that doesn’t mean we have to be isolated from our competitors.

I thought it might be interesting to begin this episode by looking at a few outstanding contesting community resources that can help add to the enjoyment we get from our investment in time and station-building.

Live, online score reporting

In recent years, thanks to the availability of Internet access from just about anywhere, a growing community of contesters are posting their live contest scores in real time to online score reporting services.

These are quite sophisticated online pages that gather up-to-the-minute contest scores from around the world and publish them live. Anyone can go online and watch the competition unfold, with stations jockeying for position in the various categories.

Over the years, I have found this to be one heck of a motivator to try harder, to keep my butt in the chair and keep turning the dial or turning the antenna looking for that next valuable multiplier or contact.

There are two primary online score reporting sites – I like them both.

Contest Online Scoreboard

This site works with all the popular contest logging programs, including N1MM Logger, WriteLog, DXlog, Win-Test and several others. The development team includes Victor VA2WA, Alex K2BB, and Randy K5ZD, and they’ve done a masterful job of building a site that is easy to use and reliable.

You can view a station’s total score up to the minute, along with the number of contacts they have, and a band-by-band breakdown, as well as their multiplier totals.

CQcontest.net’s scoreboard

Also compatible with all the major contest logging programs, CQcontest.net is a powerful score reporting site. Developed by the R4W team in Russia, it’s very popular with the global contest community.

It, too, offers a variety of ways to view the live scores – you can dive down into the details of a station’s activity, view statistics and even view hourly rate graphs for any station, all in real time.

One-stop score reporting

The good news is you don’t have to choose which online scoreboard to which you want to submit your score. There’s a very handy single address that you can plug into your contest logging software that will take your score report and automatically forward it on to both sites.

In your logging program, just point the score reporting to this address:

http://www.b41h.net/scoredistributor.php

This is a score distributor that will forward your reports to both Contest Online Scoreboard and CQcontest.net.

And don’t worry about breaking any rules by posting your score to an online score reporting site. These resources are used by many of the world’s preeminent contesters and have been designed by outstanding and scrupulous contest operators. I am not aware of any contest rules that prohibit real-time score reporting – your online score doesn’t tell anyone what frequency you are working, or who you have worked in the contest. At most, another station might be able to figure out what band you are on but not where on the band they would find you.

So give it a try. Both sites provide good guidance for setting up your particular logging software to automatically report your score in real-time.

• Contest Online Scoreboard setup


• net setup

Official score submission

One final note about score reporting. After the contest, remember to submit your official entry log to the contest sponsors. Many contests these days have short submission deadlines – some as short as a few days after a contest. Every contest will list the “log deadline” in its rules. If you miss the deadline, your log might end up being considered a “check log,” which means it wouldn’t be eligible for the competition but is still highly valuable to the log-checkers as your log can help validate the log entries of other stations.

3830scores.com score summaries

And, if you want a little more fun, consider posting your claimed score to the 3830Scores.com website. The site has custom forms to post your claimed score for just about any major contest and many smaller regional contests.

A lot of contributors like to include a brief write-up of their experiences in the contests, and these make for interesting reading in the hours and days after a contest is over. It also makes a great archive from year to year, which can be a valuable source of expert knowledge as you prepare for the next contest.

I like to use the score comparison tool to see exactly how my totals on each band matched up against similarly equipped stations in my category. It’s amazing to see how one station in my region can do well on 80M while I suffered, or vice versa. It’s useful intel to help assess your station’s weak points and strengths.

And that is how a station-building to-do list keeps getting longer.

Recapping April conditions

Our last episode was at the end of March, and at the time we were looking forward to a handful of contests in April. Looking back over the past four weeks, conditions were a real mish-mash.

The EA RTTY contest on April 7 and 8 produced surprisingly good results for us here on the North American West Coast. 20M was open to Europe from VE7 for hours both mornings, and strong enough to work down into the second tier of stations. The European country multipliers and the Spanish multipliers added up quickly, and  I ended up with my sixth best score in the 14 years I’ve been recording my entries. That’s not too bad considering we’re in the trough at the bottom of solar cycle 24.

The following weekend brought the Japan International DX CW contest on April 14 and 15. While we on the west coast usually enjoy and advantage when working Japan, in this contest the bands were truly awful. I ended up with just 12 contacts with Japanese stations, in only 10 prefectures – that’s just 10 multipliers out of a possible 50. Conditions were so poor I only entered as a 20M single band operation, and only put in about an hour as there just weren’t enough workable stations from here to justify more time.

On April 22 and 23, our Brazilian friends sponsored the Manchester Mineira or CQMM contest. I spent about five hours in that one and managed just 61 contacts and eight South American contacts. To my surprise, I had more contacts on 40M (including more South American QSOs) than I did on 20M.  That tells us something about the strength of 20M that weekend, which is kind of typical of high band conditions at solar minimum.

On the final weekend of April, we had the British Amateur Radio Telepri