If you\’ve read any of my posts at all, you are probably aware that I am an Amateur Radio operator. One of the activities within the hobby that I pursue, on occasion, is contesting, where I try to contact as many other operators in the contest as I can, and we compete with one another on how many folks we contact.
A contest last spring was the New England QSO Party (a QSO is a confirmed two-way radio conversation between operators).
I got a certificate (\”wallpaper\” in the hobby, because some of us are prone to cover our walls with such cherished proof of our radio prowess) today indicating that I had managed to break into the top five operators in the low-power (100 watts or less) category. In my county. I checked the results list. There were six operators from my county who participated. So I was also next-to-last.
To set the scale, I managed to contact 40 different people, in 20 different locales ( the locales count as multipliers – the number of people times the number of locales gives your score), so I had a score of 800. The first place finisher is a 13-year-old fellow (he\’s not a kid – he\’s a peer because he is an Amateur Radio operator like me) a few towns over. He took it a bit more seriously than I did, and accumulated 321 QSOs over 53 locales, for a score of 17,013!
But I got wallpaper!
(As an aside, further research indicates that in 2005, when I was KB1HDO, I got wallpaper for 6th place finish in Middlesex County… Yes, my prowess as an Amateur Radio operator continues to improve…)
