[CQ-Contest] US Counties QSO Party

[Scott Nichols]

  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