[CQ-Contest] WRTC 2022 is really happening

[Randy Thompson]

After a one year delay due to Covid, and historic floods in the host city of Bologna that wiped out many of the planned operating positions, the Italian Organizing Committee have persevered.

The contest runs concurrently with the IARU HF Championship starting at 8am EDST (1200 UTC) on Saturday July 8.  It ends 24 hours later at 8 am EDST on Sunday.  Send signal report and ITU zone.  IARU HQ stations will send the abbreviation of their national society.  E.g., ARRL, REF, RSGB, etc.  WRTC stations will be sending zone 28.

Approximately 60 WRTC teams will be battling it out using a different set of rules in their own competition and rules.  The WRTC teams will use special callsigns (the callsign block will be announced the day before the contest with the teams not knowing their call until 15 minutes before the contest).  To keep things fair, teams are not allowed to transmit their identity - just the minimum info and Italian callsign.  You will probably recognize some of the teams once they get to SSB, but the organizers are asking you to spot without divulging the identity of the team.  This a contest of skills, not popularity.

Put this URL in your browser to watch the live team scores updated every 5 minutes: www.wrtc2022.it<http://www.wrtc2022.it/>  This is the WRTC home page, but a live scoreboard widget should appear in the hour leading up to the contest.

One innovation for this WRTC is to have teams logging their QSOs in real-time to a central server.  This the same setup used for the month long WRTC event in January 2023 that had 50+ special event calls around the world logging over 1 billion QSOs in 30 days.  It worked from home, now we find out if it works in the field...

One benefit of real-time QSO reporting is that a live leaderboard can be shown to all of the WRTC "hunters".  Hunters are stations around the world chasing the WRTC teams on CW/SSB from 80 through 10 meters.

Put this URL in your browser favorites: www.wrtc2022.it/award<http://www.wrtc2022.it/award>  That will have the live view of where the stations are and which you have worked.

This page will show recent spots of the WRTC stations and a running list of the most recent QSOs reported.  You can go the Hunters tab and see a leaderboard of who has worked the most teams.  You can search by your own callsign and see a grid showing all the band/modes you have achieved with each WRTC team. It is kind of fun to see how many you can find.

Since all QSOs are being received in real-time, the organizers are going to spot the teams one time each time they have made 3 QSOs on a new frequency.  This has two goals; 1) to provide SSB spotting capabilities that match up with what RBN can do on CW, and 2) to give the judging committee some tools to check for cheerleading (when a team has an outsized number of QSOs from their home country).  It is definitely the first real test of online logging.  Let's hope it works out.

The teams will start coming on the air Friday afternoon as they arrive at their operating sites and set up their equipment.  Look for home calls portable I4. The start time is 2pm in Italy so they have Friday afternoon and all of Saturday morning to get things working.  Then it is 24 hours of non-stop multi-two with both ops working as fast as they can.  The teams will be limited to 100W output so may not be as loud as some other Italian stations...

Even if you only have a few minutes during the weekend, find the time to see what WRTC (and other IARU) stations you can work.  Summer conditions always seem to produce a few surprises.  The WRTC teams get extra points for working outside Europe so they will be looking for any DX. With some sporadic E it may be possible to find WRTC stations on 10m.  Look for them on 80 CW just before sunrise (0339z).

Ciao baby.  It's on!

Randy K5ZD