The Tennessee QSO Party is an annual event sponsored by the Tennessee Contest Group (TCG); this year's running was on Sunday, September 7th, from 1:00 to 11:00 PM Eastern. Its purpose is to let operators worldwide contact Tennessee amateurs in all of the state's counties, toward awards such as Worked All States and the USA Counties Award. The coveted category plaques are hand-made in the woodworking shop of Mark, K0EJ.
As last year, Mark offered us his Mowbray Mountain contest station to enter as a multi-operator, multi-transmitter, high-power station. Last year we were the designated K4TCG bonus station; this year that honor went to the crew at NJ4P near Savannah, TN, so our challenge was simply to see whether we could top last year's score.
Mark's day-to-day station is a FlexRadio 6600M running SO2R into two upgraded Alpha amps, a 4O3A Antenna Genius switch, and VA6AM bandpass filters. The towers carry stacked 5-element 20M yagis (Tower 1, 90 ft), stacked 6-element 10M yagis (Tower 2, 80 ft), stacked 5-element 15M yagis (Tower 3, 75 ft), an 80M 4-square, a 160M inverted-L between Towers 1 and 2, and a Skyhawk tribander with a rotatable 40M dipole on Tower 4 — all squeezed into just under two acres. For the TQP we added Station 2 (a FlexRadio 6600M into a Ten-Tec Titan) and Station 3 (a K3 barefoot at the kitchen table).
Setup was done Friday with everything working, but Sunday's restart meant rebuilding the network — Ted finally got it running about five minutes before the start. We ran six operators, four of us full-time. 20 and 40 meters were good at the start; 15M was disappointing, especially on SSB, though mults there improved over last year. Compared with last year's K4TCG effort, we were up on CW QSOs (810 vs 762), well down on SSB (655 vs 915), but up on multipliers (333 vs 315).
Band & Mode Summary
| Band | CW QSOs | Phone QSOs | Mults |
|---|---|---|---|
| 160m | 21 | — | 16 |
| 80m | 156 | 37 | 56 |
| 40m | 227 | 303 | 98 |
| 20m | 286 | 207 | 77 |
| 15m | 90 | 16 | 55 |
| 10m | 30 | 88 | 29 |
| 2m | — | 4 | 2 |
| Totals | 810 | 655 | 333 |
1,465 QSOs (810 CW / 655 phone) · 333 multipliers · includes 700 bonus pts (7 K4TCG QSOs)
A bit of trivia: we worked 993 unique stations, 21 DXCC entities (DL, EI, F, G, GI, GM, HB, HP, JA, KP4, LY, LZ, OK, OM, PA, SP, SV, VK, XE, YO, Z3), 57 Tennessee counties, 117 Tennessee stations, all states except Delaware, and 9 Canadian provinces (AB, BC, MB, NB, NL, NS, NT, ON, QC).
| Tennessee | 57 counties · 117 TN stations |
| U.S. states | All except Delaware |
| Canada | 9 provinces |
| DXCC | 21 entities |
| Unique stations | 993 |
K0EJ · K4VIG · KE4CMA · W4XK · WA4AA · W4NZ
Photo highlights: Bill W4XK, Mark K0EJ and Gary K4VIG at the stations, and the antenna towers on Mowbray Mountain. See the full photo gallery →
Recent TQP Scores
- 20251,464,235 pts (incl. 700 bonus)
- 20241,584,765 pts · K4TCG bonus station
- 20231,324,440 pts
TVDXA's club entry, operated from K0EJ's Mowbray Mountain station.
About the Tennessee QSO Party
The TQP is held on a Sunday in September and is sponsored by the Tennessee Contest Group (TCG). See the TVDXA TQP event page or visit tnqp.org.