The innaugural running of the US Counties QSO Party-SSB will be held
May 17 and 18, 2003...It's a 48 hour SSB contest starting 0000z May 17
and ending 2359z May 18...It's sponsored by the Mobile Amateur Radio
Awards Club (MARAC)...
This is a revamped version of the old MARAC County Hunters Contest-SSB,
which we are trying to bring back to life this year...
Think of it as a 50 State QSO Party, all at once...Each of the 3,077 US
Counties is a multiplier, so not much of a chance for a sweep (!), but
lots of multipliers to look for all weekend...Great chance to fill in
some of the holes in your USA-CA award, or even qualify for the basic
level of 500 counties for USA-CA...Mobile operation is, of course,
strongly encouraged...
We are 90% sure at this point that a Writelog module will be ready for
this years contest, which will greatly assist in the logging/scoring end
of things...I say 90% sure because, well, I don't want to make a promise
that someone else can't keep...It's in the works now, I know that...I
personally wrote the mult file and we will post a TXT, PDF, DOC and XLS
version of this file on the contest website which can be downloaded and
printed for reference...Each county has been assigned a 5 letter "code",
consisting (in most cases) of the first 3 letters of the county name and
the 2 letter standard state abbreviation...This obviously didn't work in
every case, so there are exceptions...
Full contest rules at http://www.stpaulisland.net/countycontest.html
Please note that some magazines and websites have the contest scheduled
for April 5/6, 2003...This info is incorrect...That was carried over
from last year...The magazines were notified, but apparently not in
time...The above website contains the proper, official information...
Hope you can participate!!
73,
Scott VE1OP
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