Four Hours to My First QSO: SARTG WW RTTY 2026
- 7 min reading time
W4GGJ's first RTTY contest: four hours of station troubleshooting before the first QSO, a twelve-button gaming mouse pressed into contest duty, and a Sunday-morning run that turned SARTG WW RTTY 2026 into 49 QSOs and 15,035 points from a Yaesu FT-450 and a G5RV in Florida.
- Contest: SARTG WW RTTY Contest 2026
- Operator: Joe Leone, W4GGJ — Pinellas Park, FL (EL87PT)
- Dates: Friday Aug 14, 8:00 PM ET → Sunday Aug 16, 12:00 PM ET (three 8-hour operating periods)
- Station: Yaesu FT-450 at 80W · ATU-100 EXT · G5RV · N1MM Logger+ with MMTTY (AFSK)
- Bands: 40m, 20m, 15m
- Result: 49 QSOs · 485 points · 31 multipliers · 15,035 claimed
- Worked: 11 DXCC entities across 3 continents
SARTG WW RTTY was my first RTTY contest. Not my first RTTY QSO — my first contest. Those turned out to be very different things, and I found out exactly how different somewhere around hour three of Friday night.
The contest opened at 8:00 PM Eastern on Friday. My first logged contact was DM6DX in Germany at 12:15 AM.
That gap is the whole story of this weekend.
Four hours of fighting my own station
The FT-450 has no native RTTY mode, so everything here runs AFSK: audio out of the sound card, through MMTTY, with N1MM Logger+ driving the contest side. Four separate things have to agree with each other — CAT control, transmit audio, PTT keying, and the contest configuration — and on Friday night not one of them was talking to the others.
Fix the CAT link, lose the audio. Get audio flowing, PTT won't trip. Get PTT keying, and the decode comes back as garbage. I burned more than four hours of a contest I had been looking forward to, staring at a radio that would not transmit a callsign.
That is not the gear's fault. That is a preparation failure, and it is the single biggest thing I would tell any first-time RTTY contester: prove the entire chain on a quiet weeknight. Make a few casual RTTY QSOs. Watch a real exchange go out and come back. Do not find out at the opening bell that your PTT line doesn't work.
Learning to read the noise
Once the plumbing worked, the actual skill turned up. RTTY is two tones — mark and shift — and your job is to slide the signal until both peaks sit right under the crosshairs. Mark 2125, 170 Hz shift, standard settings, and knowing the numbers is nothing like getting the peaks to line up under real band conditions with a signal that's fading.
Get it right and clean text scrolls in. Get it slightly wrong and you get this:
That's 40m on Friday night, and it's an honest picture of the learning curve. Strings of nonsense, a partial callsign, another partial, a clean CQ, then more nonsense. Scattered through it you can see my own callsign going out over and over to a station that simply was not hearing me.
Then, at 12:15 AM, everything worked at once.
Forty meters gave me seven contacts in forty-three minutes and four of them were European — Germany, Czech Republic, France, and Italy — at 80 watts into a G5RV, from Florida, in the middle of the night. After four hours of nothing, that felt like the band had personally apologized.
The twelve-button assist
Here's the one thing I got right before the contest started. RTTY contesting is function keys — run CQ, send exchange, his call, my exchange, TU, again please. In N1MM those live on F1 through F12, and hunting for them across a keyboard while a signal fades is how you lose contacts.
So the twelve-button MMO mouse came out of the drawer, and I mapped every thumb button to a function key. The whole exchange sits under one hand with no looking down. It's a gaming peripheral doing contest duty and it earned its place on the desk.
Saturday: slow, steady, and one from Denmark
Saturday's afternoon period was all twenty meters and mostly search-and-pounce: eleven contacts, a spread of US call areas, and — right at the end of the window — OZ11A in Denmark. Working a Danish station in a Scandinavian contest felt like the point of the whole thing.
One thing that keeps you humble in a contest like this: the serial numbers coming back. I was sending 17 while IN3BFW came back with 952. Somebody out there had been at it all weekend and had the log to prove it.
Sunday morning is where it clicked
That score window is from 7:09 AM Sunday, five hours before the end: 22 QSOs, 5,000 points. I photographed it because I thought that was roughly how it was going to finish.
The final period more than doubled everything.
South America opened first — PW2K in Brazil, HK3W in Colombia, back to back before 7 AM. Then the 9 o'clock hour landed fourteen contacts, my best hour of the weekend by a wide margin. And for the first time all weekend I stopped hunting and ran my own frequency: parked on 14.09368 and let people call me. Twenty of the thirty Sunday contacts came in as run QSOs.
That is the part I did not expect. Friday night I could not get one station to hear me in four hours. Sunday morning I had a small pileup of my own.
The last two contacts of the contest went in on fifteen meters, just to say I'd been there.
The final numbers
- 49 QSOs — 7 on 40m, 40 on 20m, 2 on 15m
- 485 QSO points
- 31 multipliers — 15 DXCC, 16 call areas
- 15,035 claimed score
- 11 DXCC entities: USA, Canada, Germany, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Denmark, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic
- 3 continents: North America, Europe, South America
Nobody is winning a plaque with 49 QSOs. That was never the goal. The goal was to find out whether this station could do RTTY contesting, and the answer came back yes — after it came back no for four hours first.
What I'd do differently
Test the whole chain in advance. Radio to logger, logger to sound card, sound card to radio, PTT all the way through. Prove it on a random Tuesday.
Know the macros cold. The mouse helped enormously, but only because I'd already decided what every button would send.
Get on the band during the openings. My best hour produced more than my entire first night. Twenty meters on Sunday morning was worth more than everything I did on Friday combined.
Try running sooner. I spent a day and a half hunting other people's frequencies before I ever called CQ myself. Running is where the rate came from, and I left contacts on the table by waiting.
Would I do this contest again?
Yes, and this one specifically. SARTG's three-period format is friendlier than a straight 48-hour grind — you get built-in sleep, and every period is a fresh start with a fresh band. Activity was high enough that there was always something to work, and forgiving enough that 80 watts into a wire could get through to Europe and South America.
Next year I show up with the station already proven, the macros already in muscle memory, and a plan for which band to be on when. The learning curve on this one was brutal, but you only have to climb it once.
73 de W4GGJ