At first I wouldn’t take part in the Dutch pacc. But days before the contest, I was already active making my station ready for it. Saturday 12:00 UTC (14:00 local time) the contest was started. And also I was ready and started. In the first few minutes I made some qso’s after giving cq. After this I only answered other calls. This isn’t very productive but it trains me to listen more carefully to the available signals. Which isn’t still easy for me. For those how doesn’t know, and I’ve some hearing disability. I can hear way better with my hearing aid. But HF sounds (especially those very weak signals) are very heard to hear and to determine if it is a radio amateur or nothing. And these contests are also good to train this.

The Saturday I worked “just” 12 stations on 5 bands (10, 20, 15, 40). 

The Sunday I worked an other 15 stations which included two new dxcc (country’s). Luxembourg and Ireland. Very nice! 

Just after the contest (which was finished at 12:00 UTC on Sunday). I started calculating my score. I’m not using contest software. When I started contesting I did. But soon, I discovered that this wasn’t a convincing way of logging (although for me). Maybe it’s easy for the contest. But not when you store your QSO’s in Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD). Which I use as main logging and control software for my station. I haven’t found that application that will work with HRD and is doing the calculations for me.

After most contests I made some manual calculations to see my score and also to see how many multiplexer (this is a country, province, club, etc which will multiple the value) I worked. But that’s also not the best way to do it. So I started writing my own software, what will do exactly what I want!

In just 1 hour after the contest I already had a working prototype. Which calculated my score and multiplexers. And that directly read from the HRD  database. So it reads near realtime the qso’s and and shows me the score and multiplexers. I’m happy with it. But now comes the big challenge. Every contest is different (another way of scoring, other multiplexers, etc)

So I need to adjust it a bit so it would be easy to apply new contestrulesto the software so it will work with every contest.

I will call this work in progress.