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Summer Solstice Sunday Sprint (22 June, 2025)
Here are the results from this year’s Rudolf Hell memorial Full Day of Hell event, held on 19 December.
As with our last Full Day of Hell event, turnout was VERY good with 54 entrants in all categories.
This month we had 33 entrants in total, including every category except DX QRP.
October "Full Day of Hell" Sprint
This month’s Full Day of Hell had a total of 67 log submissions from 62 members and 5 non-members.
Furthermore, these submissions included participants in all four categories and from 11 countries including Australia.
This kind of turnout is outstanding and shows that the popularity of the HELL modes is increasing.
Congratulations to all of our winners and a big thanks to all of the participants as well.
We ended up with 19 participants who submitted logs, covering every category except for DX QRP.
September "Hell on Wheels" Sprint
Turnout was rather light, with only 14 submissions in 6 of the 8 possible categories.
There were no entrants in the DX or North American QRP categories, and only one entry with no QSOs in the DX Mobile.
August "Full Day of Hell" Sprint
Turnout was pretty good and included participants from Canada, United States, Argentina, and Uruguay for multipliers.
Additionally, participants from Sweden and Poland submitted logs and reported working additional stations in Bolivia, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
This month’s competition for the top score was close despite horrible band conditions due to a series of solar flares and CMEs.
Overall, participation was light, likely due to the poor band conditions.
This month we had a good turnout with 24 separate log submissions in three categories.
Although conditions were not great and despite a reduced number of participants, we were still able to get entries in two categories for this year’s event.
We had no entries in the Mobile or Portable categories this year.
Please give me a moment of your time to recognize the winners of the 2015 Hamvention Sprint. As in previous years, this Sprint is divided into two sessions with separate winners in each category for each session.
Based upon the logs I reviewed, there appeared to be a large amount of activity for this Sprint in both sessions but surprisingly we ended up with less than a dozen score submissions. That’s a shame as several session categories went unawarded because of this. It only takes a minute to submit your logs via the online form and you can win some categories with only a single QSO, so it always pays to submit your scores for the events.
Please take a moment to recognize the winners of the 2015 New Member (Newbie) Sprint. Each April we take the time to reward our new membership with a Sprint where they are the focus of activity and this year the new members came out in force. Despite poor propagation, we finished with 18 entrants in three categories and two of the three winners were indeed new members, which is the intent of this event.
The four Leprechauns were (in order) Larry (N3LFC), Ole (EA2BER), Ron (W4ALE) and Paul (VA3PC). Thank you, gentlemen, for your assistance in making this sprint a success.
In addition to the competition categories, we also had one SWL log submitted.
Eric (3A1001SWL) submitted a log with 4 QSOs including 2 Leprechauns. Thank you for your participation, Eric.
Thank you to all who submitted logs for this Sprint.
This year’s BINGO Sprint took place on the same weekend as the ARRL DX CW contest and as a result there were difficult conditions to be found.
Our overall participation was down this month, likely due to the difficult conditions and some members participating in the DX contest.
No one managed to score a BINGO, but there were many that were only one or two squares away from doing so.
Likely because of the heavy activity on 20m during the contest, 15m seemed to be the best band based upon submitted comments, although we saw QSOs reported from 80m through 6m.
This Full Day of Hell focused on working stations outside of the Americas, with multipliers awarded for each country worked in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.
Despite some reportedly poor propagation conditions, we had a very large turnout with nearly 60 participants from 14 countries, including 5 “first time” participants.
The challenge in this event, and the challenge is intentional, is for all stations to work DX.
All too often, Feld Hell events are easily won by North American stations because of the densities of multipliers of States and Provinces that count as individual multipliers.
This event recognizes the VALUABLE contributions made by our DX membership and attempts to allow them the same advantage that we in North America enjoy each and every month.
As a result of this focus on DX, we had a large number of North American participants that were unable to work any DX station, resulting in a multiplier of “zero” and thus a score of zero.
This impacted one category of the competition in particular; the North American QRP category.
We had two entrants in the NA QRP category and neither were able to work DX stations.
As such, in order to assign a score I gave each station a multiplier bonus of 1 which resulted in a base score for the stations.
The winning score in the category was then calculated based upon standard QSO scoring guidelines.
We ended up with a decent turnout of 32 logs submitted in all 4 categories. Overall, the comments were positive regarding the Sprint, including “a lot of fun” and “My first time. Real fun!!!”, and a few comments about band conditions not being great. I appreciate the feedback on the contest conditions as this helps us look at future editions of each contest, so please feel free to share your comments when submitting logs. Now, onto the scores and analysis.
A part of this contest is the strategy related to choosing bands vs QSO rate (lower bands worth more points).
Therefore, I thought that I should share the total QSOs and points (combining member & non-member QSOs) for each of the bands, as reported by those submitting logs:
160m - 24 QSOs / 272 points
80m - 128 / 712 points
40m - 164 / 450 points
As you can see, the 80m band was arguably the most productive; not necessarily in terms of the number of QSOs, but rather in the number of points.
Furthermore, although 160m accounted for only about 15% of the number of QSOs compared to 40m, it accounted for 60% of the point total achieved on 40m,
with each QSO on 160m worth 4 times the points of those on 40m.
For previous years' sprint results, please visit the archive pages.
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