Handbook, chapter 16. Awards, contests, expeditions
The first few dozen contacts are interesting in themselves: it works! and that far! Then comes the moment when you have made your hundredth contact with the neighbouring region, and the question «what now» becomes unavoidable.
The answer was worked out long ago, and it is the same as in any hobby that has lasted for decades: you need a goal that somebody keeps score of.
Awards: a goal that makes you learn
An award is a piece of paper for meeting a condition: so many countries, so many regions, so many islands or grid squares. In itself it is worth nothing, and that is the whole trick.
The value lies in what you have to do along the way. To take a hundred countries you have to get to grips with propagation, learn to hear weak signals, wait for an opening on 10 metres, build a better antenna and get up at five in the morning, because that is when the direction you need opens. The award is the pretext; the skills are what stays.
The conditions vary; the logic is always the same:
| Type of condition | Example | What you will have to learn |
|---|---|---|
| Countries | a hundred different countries | propagation, DX hunting, patience |
| Areas of your own country | every region of Ukraine | working close-in contacts and the low bands |
| Grid squares | the Maidenhead grid | VHF, directional antennas, accurate pointing |
| Special sites | islands, castles, parks, lighthouses | working expeditions and pile-ups |
| A mode or a band | all of the above but on CW only | the mode itself |
For a beginner, the most useful award is the one whose conditions you have almost met without noticing: look through your log, find what is missing for the nearest round figure, and fill the gap. That gives you a first result in a week rather than a year.
And one more purely practical point: an award counts confirmed contacts. So confirmation is not bureaucracy but half the job.
Contests: a sport that looks pointless
A contest is when you have to make as many contacts as possible in a day or a weekend under known rules. The exchange is tiny: a report and a serial number or a zone. No names, no weather.
From outside it looks pointless. From inside it is a sport of stamina, hearing and the ability to hold a frequency — and the fastest way there is to learn to operate. In a single contest a newcomer makes more contacts than in the previous six months, and afterwards the microphone stops being frightening for good.
The arithmetic that decides a contest
The score is almost always a product: points for contacts multiplied by the number of different multipliers — countries, zones, regions.
A newcomer chases the number of contacts, because that is what the counter shows. But in a product it is always the weaker half that is worth more.
One new multiplier is now worth more than ten contacts. Half an hour hunting a rare country beats half an hour calling on your own frequency.
Move the sliders and see when half an hour of calling on your own frequency pays better, and when half an hour of hunting for a rare country does. That is the whole of contest tactics, and it works like arithmetic rather than like gambling.
The «points × multipliers» scheme is the commonest but not the only one: different contests award different points for different continents, define multipliers differently and have different entry categories. You read a particular contest's rules before it, not after, and the organiser publishes them.
How to start in a contest
An order of business that saves you from the commonest mistake — giving up in the first hour:
- Pick a small contest, not a multi-day one. A few hours are quite enough.
- Do not set yourself a score to beat. The goal of a first contest is to make fifty contacts and get the rhythm.
- At first only answer other people's calls. Calling yourself is the next step: it takes the ability to hold a frequency and to pick out several stations at once.
- Check in advance that your logging software works. Writing a contest into a notebook is a sure way never to submit your entry.
- Submit your log even if you made ten contacts. Your log is not for you: it is what the people you worked get their contacts checked against.
The pile-up: how not to get in everyone's way, including your own
When a station comes on the air from a rare location, dozens and sometimes thousands call it at once. This is called a pile-up, and not everyone knows how to behave in one.
The rules here were worked out by DXers themselves, and they are about results rather than manners: a disciplined pile-up gets through three times as many contacts, which means your own chances in it are better.
Listen, listen, and listen again. That is half of everything. Before you call, you need to work out the operator's rhythm: where they are listening, who they are calling, when they pause.
Call only if you can hear the DX confidently. If you can barely make them out, they certainly will not hear you — and you will be occupying the frequency.
Check the callsign yourself. Do not rely on the DX cluster: a wrong callsign sits there regularly and a hundred people log a station that does not exist.
Do not tune up on the DX frequency. Ever. Tuning a transmitter in the band where they are listening is the rudest thing you can do on the air.
Wait for the other contact to finish. Calling over a report exchange makes the operator ask for a repeat and slows the queue for everyone, yourself included.
Send your callsign in full. The last two characters are not a callsign. The operator has to hear all of it, otherwise the contact will not count.
Once you have called, listen. Calling continuously does not make you louder, it makes you interference.
Stay quiet when they are not calling you. If the operator sends a callsign unlike yours, or asks for a repeat of someone else's, or calls another continent, then transmitting at that moment harms everybody.
And the last and simplest one: do not call if you have already worked them. A second contact will not count anyway, and you are taking one away from somebody else right now.
Expeditions: when the rare one is you
The third part of the same thing. Somebody takes their equipment to an island, a castle, a park or simply a region nobody has worked from in years — and for a few days becomes the rare one everybody is hunting.
It turns out to be more accessible than it looks. You do not have to fly to an atoll: a trip up a hill or into a rare grid square with a handheld is already an expedition, and a few watts off a battery are enough to build a queue.
And it is the best way to test everything you have read in this book at once: the antenna you have to put up in half an hour out of whatever you have; propagation, which does not ask when it suits you; and the ability to run a contact when five people are calling you.
What not to do
Do not chase an award that does not interest you. A condition met through gritted teeth gives you nothing — neither skills nor pleasure.
Do not compare your score with someone else's blindly. A station with a kilowatt and three tiers of antennas on a hilltop will make more contacts than you with a balcony dipole, and that is not about skill. What is worth comparing is you against yourself a year ago — which is exactly what a carefully kept log is for.
Do not chase quantity at the expense of data quality. A contact logged wrongly counts for nobody: not for you and not for the other station.
Next — chapter 17, where to go next: where the hobby leads once the book has ended.