• WRTC 2018 Teams Produce Amazing Contact Totals Despite Poor Conditions

    From ARRL de WD1CKS@VERT/WLARB to QST on Mon Jul 16 23:40:12 2018
    07/16/2018

    A crack team of contesters from Lithuania has won the gold medal in World Radiosport Team Championship 2018 (WRTC 2018[1]), held over the weekend in Germany. Operating as Y81N, Gedas Lucinskas, LY9A, and Mindis Jukna, LY4L, topped the real-time scoreboard for much of the event, which is held as a competition within a contest in conjunction with the IARU HF Championship. Lucinskas and Jukna had ended up in sixth place during WRTC 2014, held in New England. They posted a raw score of 594,015 poi, logging 3,668 CW contacts and 1,544 SSB contacts.

    Conditions during the event were mediocre at best.

    Taking second place to the pleasure of the German sponsors was the Y81A team of Manfred Wolf, DJ5MW, and Stefan von Baltz, DL1IAO, with 538,5432 points, with 3,620 CW contacts and 1,354 SSB contacts. They placed third in a nail-biting finale for the bronze at WRTC 2014. The mostly German audience gave Wolf and Baltz a huge ovation.

    In the third spot this time around was the WRTC 2014 defending champion team of Dan Craig, N6MJ, and Chris Hurlbut, KL9A, who operated as Y82V, and racked up 506,461 points, putting 3,769 CW contacts and 1,052 phone contacts into their log.

    The WRTC 2014 second-place team of Rastislav Hrnko, OM3BH, and Jozef Lang, OM3GI, from the Slovak Republic landed in tenth place at WRTC 2018.

    This year's first-place team scored nearly 1.25 million fewer points but some 650 more contacts than the WRTC 2014 first-place team of N6MJ and KL9A. Overall, the competitors logged more than 300,000 contacts during the 24-hour event.

    "The excitement of the competitors is at least as high as that of the spectators watching the [Live] Scoreboard[2]," WRTC 2018 organizers said as the event was starting to wind down. "But what distinguishes viewers from contesters is that the spectators can see the current position of all of the stations - the contest teams do not."

    Determining the final results of WRTC 2018 involved an extensive log-checking process, based in part on comparisons between IARU HF Contest logs submitted to WRTC 2018 for that purpose.

    The father-son Y87B team of Jeff Briggs, K1ZM, and Patrick Briggs, KK6ZM, won the SSB Leader Award. The CW leaders, operating as Y83O, were Tonno Vahk, ES5TV, and Toivo Hallikivi, ES2RR, of Estonia.

    Claiming the award for the most accurate log - which was said to be very close - was the Y86V team of Leo Slavov, OR2F, and Pascal Lierman, ON5RA, of Belgium. They made 39 logging errors. The overall logging accuracy was reported to have been "better than 95% accuracy."

    Jannsen said he's looking forward to 2022 and the next WRTC, which will take place in Bologna, Italy, as announced at the closing ceremony. 


    [1] http://www.wrtc2018.de/
    [2] http://sb.wrtc2018.de/

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