The ARRL Letter, July 19, 2019

The ARRL Letter
July 19, 2018
Rick Lindquist, WW1ME, Editor

[Note: Clicking on the story links below will take you to the news article as it appears in The ARRL Letter on the ARRL website.]

• WRTC 2018: Amazing Contact Totals, Scores Despite Poor Conditions
• ARRL Announces Two Career Opportunities
• The Doctor Will See You Now!
• ARRL Represented at IEEE Symposium
• RadioShack “Express Stores” to Open in HobbyTown USA Locations
• BIRDS-2 Constellation CubeSats Transported to ISS for August Deployment
• Final Preparations Under Way for Youth on the Air 2018 in South Africa
• Jack Gerbs, WB8SCT, Appointed General Chairman for Hamvention 2019
• US ARDF Champions Prepare for International Competition in Korea
• In Brief…
• The K7RA Solar Update
• Just Ahead in Radiosport
• Upcoming ARRL Section, State, and Division Conventions

____________________________________________

ARRL Website, Some Services to be Down Briefly on July 25: The ARRL website and some services will be down for maintenance for up to 1 hour on Wednesday, July 25, starting at approximately 0900 UTC. During this period some or all systems may be temporarily inaccessible. This affects all content on http://www.arrl.org (including the ARRL Store), https://ift.tt/2vXiU42, and https://ift.tt/2kZsL1H. Logbook of The World and email will not be affected. We apologize for any inconvenience.
____________________________________________

WRTC 2018: Amazing Contact Totals, Scores Despite Poor Conditions

A crack team of contesters from Lithuania won the gold medal in World Radiosport Team Championship 2018 (WRTC 2018), held over the weekend in Germany. Operating as Y81N, Gedas Lucinskas, LY9A, and Mindis Jukna, LY4L, topped the real-time scoreboard for much of the event, which is held as a competition within a contest, in conjunction with the IARU HF Championship. Lucinskas and Jukna had ended up in sixth place during WRTC 2014, held in New England. In WRTC 2018 they posted a final score of 5,690,685 points, logging 5,139 contacts, with a heavy emphasis on CW. Final results for all competing teams have been posted on the WRTC 2018 website.

Despite conditions during the weekend that were no better than mediocre, the 63 competing teams logged a total of 262,746 contacts during the 24-hour competition.

Taking second place to the pleasure of the German sponsors was the Y81A team of Manfred Wolf, DJ5MW, and Stefan von Baltz, DL1IAO, with 5,273,488 points, with 4,936 contacts, a majority on CW. They placed third in a nail-biting finale for the bronze at WRTC 2014. The mostly German audience gave Wolf and Baltz a huge ovation at the WRTC 2018 awards ceremony.

In the third spot this time around was the WRTC 2014 defending champion team of Dan Craig, N6MJ, and Chris Hurlbut, KL9A, who operated as Y82V, and racked up a final tally of 4,891,710 points, heavily weighted toward CW.

The WRTC 2014 second-place team of Rastislav Hrnko, OM3BH, and Jozef Lang, OM3GI, from the Slovak Republic landed in 10th place at WRTC 2018.

This year’s first-place team scored nearly 1.5 million fewer points but 567 more contacts than the WRTC 2014 first-place team of N6MJ and KL9A.

The WRTC 2018 Live Scoreboard transformed the event from an isolated radio competition into a sporting event that could be followed online around the world. Although Live Scoreboard viewers knew where things stood among the 63 teams, the competitors had no clue until the event concluded.

Determining the final results of WRTC 2018 involved an extensive log-checking process, based in part on comparisons between IARU HF Contest logs submitted to WRTC 2018 for that purpose. Randy Thompson, K5ZD, reported at the July 16 closing ceremony that the evaluation committee received 3,500 logs within 16 hours of the event’s end for auditing competitors’ logs.

The father-son Y87B team of Jeff Briggs, K1ZM, and Patrick Briggs, KK6ZM, won the SSB Leader Award. The CW leaders, operating as

Read the full article at https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/the-arrl-letter-july-19-2019.621065/. STRAY SIGNALS does not claim ownership of the article.

Tweet

!function(d,s,id) {
var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if(!d.getElementById(id)) {
js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);
}
}
(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

from Stray Signals https://ift.tt/2LCbvKx
via IFTTT

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2uTuXLF
via IFTTT