Amateur radio contesting is a way to practice your skills as a radio operator as well as to allow you to socialize with others in a group setting or even on the air. As a group, JCARC usually has a get together during ARRL Field Day on the last week of June each year with a cookout and a lot of fish stories flying about along with 2 or 3 stations set up to make contacts. The socializing part to our club is more important than the contacts, so we may have only one or two stations operating at one time.

If you're solo, due to the fast pace of contacts during a contest, there's very little time to socialize over the air, but it is occasionally done. Instead of reinventing the wheel or plagerizing another site, there's a lot of information to be had from SocialHams.Net's radio contesting page. We hope you'll find it interesting, then come back here to check out the links to the contests below and the Contest Calendar.