This comes to us from VT ARRL Section Manager Paul AA1SU:
VT QSO Party is this weekend!
The Vermont QSO Part starts at 7 PM on Friday, February 2 and ends at 7 PM on Sunday, February 4. This is your chance to put the rare state of Vermont on the air! Stations around the world will be looking for us, so Search & Pounce is not the way to go. Make sure that you call “CQ Vermont QSO Party” as much as possible. You send signal report and 3 letter abbreviation for your county. They send signal report and state or province. DX just sends signal report.
New this year, special rules to allow FT8 contacts.
Use of the WSJT low-signal digital modes such as FT8, JT65, JT9, JT4 and others will have special rules. These modes employ short, 13-character exchanges and normally only the grid square is exchanged. Vermont stations can utilize these modes only if they modify their exchange to send their 3-character county in place of their grid square. However,
Vermont stations cannot claim any multiplier credit for any contacts using these special modes. Non-Vermont stations can claim Vermont county multiplier credit using these modes.
The logging program N1MM+ supports this contest. Software that automatically looks up call sign address is not acceptable. Examples of this are Ham Radio Deluxe and N3FJP. So, if you use either of these, make sure that you turn that feature off. Self spotting on the DX Cluster IS allowed, but should be limited to once per band change, or
once per hour. You may also use the cluster to find stations to work.
Valid club multipliers for 2018: W1NVT N1GVT W1JXN.
More detailed information and discussion can be found at:
http://www.ranv.org/vtqso.html
From here you will find another link to the specific rules, county abbreviations, and other fun information.
For example, there are notes about 5 other contests that will be going on at the same time. The contest exchange and other details are included so that you know what to send them so that they can get credit or working you, too. If you make some contacts in these other tests, I encourage you to send them a log, as well. Just make sure that you also log it for Vermont, or merge the logs later.
So get on the air Friday night. It's going to be a fun weekend!
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ARRL Vermont Section
Section Manager: Paul N Gayet, AA1SU
aa1su@arrl.org
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Originally posted by Jason Garneau – STARC President on 2018-01-30
