Last weekend was my first big contest weekend. It was THE traditional “Finnkampen” or the Sweden -Finland HAM contest…well to be honest it wasn’t just that, but it was the Scandinavian Activity Contest. 🙂 It sure was a lot of fun and very interesting experiment as untill now I have just worked two SRAL Peruskisa (Finnish Amateur Radio League monthly contest). It feels that I’m starting to like this exiting part of the HAM radio hobby! It is kinda exiting and fun. Should work more contests…
I think I did quite OK in the contest, considering my very very limited time (remember that I’m a father of a 2 months old daughter :-)). I might have done even better with just a couple of more hours, but I’m very pleased to my results anyway. Below you can see my QSO amounts in the timeline. I worked this contest in 3 parts as can be seen from the picture. Just when I needed to end my contest there was quite a nice pile-up going, but man’s gotta do what man’s gotta do. I needed to leave the Hamshack…
BTW. I used my trusty old MacLogger DX and it’s contest -functionality to log my contest QSO’s. It’s because I’m kinda familiar with it and messed therefore only one or two QSO’s because I pressed wrong button (and was tired during the night shift…). So it worked out really fine in the very hectic times of the contest. The MacLogger DX can’t however produce the Cabrillo log format that was required to submit the log, so I needed somekind of a conversion software from ADIF-to-CAB. Luckily I found (and purchased) a very nice Windows software called Contest Log Checker for this task. It really works like a charm and produces fully compatible Cabrillo 3.0 file and even knows the SAC-CW and SAC-SSB contests by default!! I really recommend you to check that software. No I’m not affiliated to any of these software, but I’m just a happy (paying) customer. 🙂
So I was able to submit my log and claim my score (9744). When writing this I’m in the 5th place in my Low Power – Rookie -class. Not bad 🙂 Lets see how the situation changes when all the logs are submitted. There is still some time left (by 2400 UTC on Sunday 23 October). You can follow the proceedings in the sactest.net You can also read more about SAC contest and it’s history (in Finnish) from SRAL -pages