Recap: 2021 BARTG RTTY Sprint

January 24, 2021 — The British Amateur Radio Teleprinter Group’s annual 24-hour “Sprint” teletype contest was its usual challenge and a lot of fun. For a day starting at 4 a.m. Jan. 23 and continuing until 4 a.m. Jan. 24, the world works everyone.

As it’s a sprint, making lots of contacts is a key to success, but so is putting a lot of multipliers in the log. In this one, each country and each US, Canadian, Japan and Australia call areas are multipliers. And then you multiply your score by the number of continents worked during the contest.

So, it’s super important to work all six continents if you can. This year, I did — but it has been six years since I had them all.

I put in 9.75 hours, going by the N1MM clock but a lot of that was idle time (five minutes between CQs, etc.) while distractedly doing other things as activity wasn’t there to warrant full-time attention.

Thanks to the Canary Is. station EA8OM for Africa — the only AF heard from this end of North America. Missed finding Aldo YV5AAX for the South American mult; fortunately, CX, PY and LU stations were there, though rather sparse and I had to go to 15M to find any. Alas, 15M wasn’t much help at all this time out. But soon… oh, soon it will be th money band again.

Didn’t see the dramatic Saturday afternoon JA runs on 20M from previous years. Big thanks to those who get on to hand out the invaluable 10 JA multipliers. 20M over the pole was rather sketchy here, so only a handful of EU countries ended up in the log. Without that path there’s not much hope of being competitive.

One ZL for the OC mult, and no KH6 or (hugely important) VKs. As I often say, thank God for New Zealand (me being a Kiwi).

I really enjoy the BARTG contests and as the solar cycle improves let’s hope 6 continents is the steady state for a few years (last time I bagged ’em all in this one was 2014).

Anyone scanning the contest calendar will see there’s a grand lineup of awesome contests coming up through February, with something for everyone regardless of mode preferences. Here’s a quick look:

• CQ 160M CW Jan. 29-31 (rules)
• NOTE! BC QSO Party Feb. 6-7 (rules)
• Mexico XE RTTY Feb. 6-7 (rules)
• NEW! European Union EU DX Feb. 6-7 (rules)
• CQWW WPX RTTY Feb. 16-14 (rules)
• ARRL Intl. DX CW Feb. 20-21 (rules)
• CQ 160M SSB Feb. 26-28 (rules)
• FT4 DX Contest Feb. 27-28 (rules)

Looking forward to being in there with everyone.

73 and thanks for the contacts!

— Bud VA7ST

Year-over-year performance
in BARTG RTTY Sprint