NM QSO Party 2010

I recently participated in the 2010 NM QSO Party. This is the second year I've entered. This year the organizer changed the entry categories so if you have a driver you are in the multi-op category. My wife, K5AKS, drove so we multi-op'ed.

The QSO party started at 8:00 am MST so we drove over from Midland planning to arrive in NM by the start time. Unfortunately we ran into some thick fog on the way over so we got a late start. The first QSO was in the log at 8:39 am MST.

We had a great time covering 10 counties on the way to Taos. We arrived in Taos around 4:30 pm, which was near the start of the Super Bowl. In total we made 340 QSO's with 46 multipliers. With the addition of 50,000 bonus points for activating 10 counties with 15 QSO's or more our claimed score is 112,192 points. Not bad! That's about 2-1/2 times our score from last year. Of course, those bonus points really helped!

As always, I used CQ/X de NO5W for logging. However, this is the first time I've remembered to set up the GPS log so each QSO is recorded with the latitude and longitude of the location of the QSO. On my way home I started wondering if I could set up the GPS log in a KML file to display each QSO on Google Maps. I did some searching and found a program to convert a CSV file to KML format. After some gymnastics with Excel I had the GPS log in a format suitable for the conversion program. I was able to insert that KML file into a county map overlay KML created by CQ/X and, voila, my log was on Google Maps!

NO5W has now added that capability to CQ/X (as of patch 177-06) so I can skip the reformatting step and go straight from GPS log to KML file. That's a really nice new feature in CQ/X.

I'm looking forward to seeing the QSO party results which should be available around May 1.