Akademisk Radioklubb

Welcome back, we’ve now reached part 2 of the yearly recap. Throughout 2024 we got a lot of QSOs, and in this blogpost we will try to give an overview of who we talked to. To make it more visually appealing, we’ve created these graphs and maps for the occasion. It’s perhaps a little small, but it’s possible to zoom in and hover if you want to enlarge the graphics. However, it’s a bit crude, so please be patient and reset if needed. At first, let’s have a peek at which countries we have reached:

Perhaps not surprising that Germany is our most logged country this year. It is a country with many radio amateurs right outside of our skip zone. It would be interesting to see how this evolved through the year, so let’s have a look at the animation below.

We see that QSOs come mostly in jumps, which we can guess corresponds to the contests we have participated in. Perhaps easier to see without the animation, but it shows a fairly general overview for the year.

We can see a few very active weeks and many weeks with little activity. The tall bars correspond to the big contests we participated in, and the lower bars typically correspond to more casual contest participation or no contest at all. Since this corresponds so much to the contests, perhaps it would be interesting to look at them by the logs:

The two contests where we got, by far, the most QSOs were CQ WPX RTTY and CQ WW RTTY. Perhaps not so strange since the CQ-sponsored contests tend to be the most active throughout the year. We currently lack the CW-skills to get equally many QSOs in the CW-versions, but we probably could have reached similar numbers if we had joined the SSB-equivalents. The reason it didn’t happen this year is because CQ WPX SSB happened during the Easter break, and the most eager of us joined LN8W for CQ WW SSB.

The total number of QSOs for a contest is interesting, but the effort we put into each of these can vary a lot. Let’s look at the rate of QSOs to get an impression of how active they are regardless of our engagement:

The QSO-rate is somewhat difficult to express, but we can for example look at how many QSOs we got in the best half-hour of the contest. It is perhaps no surprise that the contests where we ran two transmitters are dominating in the top, but there are also surprises, e.g. SP DX and HA DX. Both of which were only operated with a single transmitter.

We can also have a look at the different modes we used this year. To no surprise is SSB and RTTY the most popular, but it is perhaps more surprising that we got more RTTY QSOs than SSB QSOs. This is likely a result of participating in CQ WPX/WW RTTY and not in CQ WPX/WW SSB. We can also look at the distribution of modes throughout the year:

Once again, we see that the contests dominate the plot and that many weeks have almost exclusively the mode used in that week’s contest. It could also be interesting to look at the same plot for only our non-contest QSOs:

Here we see quite a different picture, with more FT8 and less conversational modes. After a rush of QSOs immediately after the new year, they are more evenly distributed throughout the year.

We can also see if the most common callsigns in our log show any interesting trends:

There is no surprise that the top is dominated by active contesters, but perhaps a bigger surprise is that the top 5 is dominated by Ukrainian stations. I hypothesize that they are both reasonably close and at a longitude that allows us to reach them on both day and night bands without staying up too late. LA2T, our neighbor club station, is at a good shared 11th place.

At any point in time, we have quite many aspiring radio amateurs as members who have not yet received their radio amateur license and callsign. Fortunately, they can operate under supervision according to §9 of the regulation. Thus can it be interesting to see how much that is used in our club:

Perhaps no surprise that they are in the minority, but they have reached almost a thousand QSOs combined.

Notably, the YLs got more QSOs than the OMs on Field Day. It would be interesting to see if this trend was the same for the rest of the year:

It did not, but single operators can have quite a lot of influence over this kind of statistics.

We have so far seen the variations throughout the year, but we can also plot the intraday statistics. And when we do so, why not also add in the bands as well:

No surprise that the bulk of the activity is in convenient day hours, but the dip around 12.00 UTC is more of a surprise to us. We suspect this is related to 24 hour contests that both start and end at noon. The bands are quite clearly separated in day/night bands.

Not all statistics are easily plotted and easier to show in a table, so we round off with one: