This is one fun little contest sponsored by the KnightLites. They are a QRP club down in North Carolina. Since that is my dad's home state I can only say good things about them. This is one of the three contest in the milliwatt triple crown. It is run right after Christmas each year. The basic concept is for both parties to work in the contest while running under one watt - QRPp. The lower the power you use the more points you get for the contact. Any QSO at over one watt is worth 1 point, any QSO at under 1 mWatts is worth 500 points. There are extra points for working club stations. The multipliers for the contest are the states, provinces DX countries. The contest run for four hours on each of three consecutive days. Each day is scored as a separate contest and your final score is the sum of the best two daily scores.

Day one was December 26th. The contest ran from 1800z to 2200z that day. The times are shifted each day to give a range of propagation and bands over the three day contest. I started off at 8 mWatts with Arn, K0ZK in ME. That gave me 128 points. Next came Dan, KF4VTM, also at 8 mWatts. He was running a club station so that gave me a nice 4,000 point club bonus. Then I kicked the power up a bit and ran off six more QSOs for the day. I ended up with 354 QSO points, six states, and two clubs for a final first day score of 10,368 points. Not bad for the first day considering I only spent a little over an hour of the four hour contest on the air.

The second day I spent playing off and on in the contest. I started again with Arn, K0ZK in ME. Again I ran 8 mWatts. The strategy was much as it was the day before. I went out to get a few QSOs at a very low power level to accumulate the QSO points, and then went to higher powers to pick up additional QSOs so as to get the multipliers. I would take the club stations at whatever power I could get them in order to get the bonus points. This time with the later start for the contest 40 meters was a much more productive band. The evening ended with nine QSOs. One was a DUP. I picked up six multipliers again, but did better with the club stations. So the final score for the second day was 16,064 points. Once again I did not spend more than an hour on the contest.

Day three was to be different. I expect 40 meters to be the band of choice. It was not. It was noisy and crowded. I ended up with only two QSO there. I picked up KF4VTM when I asked him to QSY from 20 meters in order to get the club points. An 80 meter QSY did not work. I also picked up NQ4RP there later, but we struggled to complete that QSO. 20 meters turned out to be the band of choice.

This was the first day I did not start off with 8 mWatts working Arn, K0ZK. I had to wait until later to pick him up. In all we hooked up five time in the contest with three of them at 8 mWatts. This day it started with Jack, K4BYF, in FL at 50 mWatts. The second QSO was what I thought at the time would be the high point of the contest when I worked John, GW4JXN, with 50 mWatts. He was running a full 5 watts. The high point came almost an hour later when I hooked up with Jim, AL7FS, in Alaska on 10 meters. He was running 400 mWatts to my 500 mWatts. Now I think I'm going to have to give up on working on WAS 2xQRP and move on to WAS 2xQRPp. Shortly after that QSO I had to take a break to play a game of Risk with the family. Fortunately I was eliminated quickly and was able to return to finish off the contest with three more QSOs.

The final score for the second day ended up with 11 QSOs, 8 states and one DX. I did better this time on the club QSOs. So the final score for the day was a nice 38,100 points. That made my best two day total 54,164 points.