World Amateur Radio Day 2020
The Unión de Radioaficionados Españoles (URE) ran an event to commemorate the 95th anniversary of the IARU with was founded on 18th April 1925 - 18th April is also World Amateur Radio Day each year. It ran from the 15th to 30th April. I had to have a go! There were 10 callsigns of the form AMxWARD and 9 bands in use, from 160m thru 6m. And as you might imagine there are quite a few pileups. I only used FT8 with the occasional FT4 but the stations were active on SSB, CW and digi-modes (I spotted them on RTTY, PSK31, FT4 and FT8).
After I made sufficient contacts for the Silver award I was going to stop, but after a short breather decided to go for Gold, finally making that on the penultimate day. I made myself a personal target of at least one contact on all the bands I can operate on, so 40m thru 6m, but I never managed 12m due to pileups. I also never managed to get the 10th station - pskreporter showed that they were receiving me but again, the pileups.
While I came nowhere really on the ‘score board’ (apparently 251st in the UK) this event was a lot of fun, if actually quite hard at times. My bit of wet string in the loft clearly lets me down but then again I did see some relatively decent spots of my calls via pskreporter, just not quite when and where I needed them.
I did also manage a couple of contacts with another Spanish special event station as well as one contact with GB2ARD (just a few miles away), both operating for World Amateur Radio Day.
Of course, during all of this I was struggling with my possessed PC which almost floored my final contact for the Gold award, but after beating it into submission and leaving everything turned on for 3 days it worked out. Time to rip it apart.