va3pc

Contesting...

I sort of fell into contesting by accident.  I was over to the Corbeil Contest Club site a few times to hoist antennas and help out with tower erections.  Then I went over during a contest to see what all the hullaballoo was.  They threw me into a chair on the "mult" station and told me to look for multipliers and I was hooked. (Don't worry - the vocabulary lesson comes next!).  From there, I tried a few SSB contests on my own, and shortly thereafter discovered the joys of RTTY Contesting.

Ken Smith (whose call va3sk is the one most often used) usually operates all the CQ and RAC contests.  In the CQ he operates a class of station called "Multi-Single".  This is a multi-operator station with a single transmitter on the air. The rules state you can have a second station looking for multipliers.  What's a multiplier you ask?  Multipliers vary by contest, in one it can be one of 40 zones that the world is divided into, in another it could be a unique prefix of a callsign, or the state or province the station is located in.  Contest periods can last from 4 hours to 48 hours.
Multipliers can be accumulated (once again depending on contest rules) on a per band, or contest basis.
Each contact results in qso points, and that point total is multiplied by the multiplier count to come up with a final score.  It sounds complicated, but we have computer scoring that makes things a whole lot easier.
In any case with a multi-single operation, the second station can tune up and down the bands and can only contact stations that count as a new multiplier.  The first station that is used to contact as many stations as possible is the "RUN" station, the second station that is used to chase multipliers is aptly named "MULT" or "S and P" (search and pounce).Some of the operators that I have found operating at the CCC over a contest weekend include Ken va3sk, Mike va3mw, Peter ve3hg, Greg va3ggf, Tony ve3rz, Keeling ve3xkb, Bill va3spt, Ken bd4rr, Jack va3jak, John ko4oe (now k3gl) and quite a few more that escape me.  If you feel the urge, come on out! Always room for more operators..   (The secret is that if we get enough operators, we can operate multi-two!).I'll incorporate some more stuff here as I find it on my hard drive (I did publish some CCC info on tripod.com a few years back as part of a web design course, but they locked it down when I didn't update it regularly).

73 Paul