Radiosport Leads to Very Busy Bands, K3LR Participates

[Gary Mikitin, AF8A]

Should anyone lookout their spectrum displays this weekend, or log into one of the web SDRS, check on the ham bands 160-10 meters. You should see literally thousands of signals, during this, one of the biggest 'contesting' weekend of the year:  ARRL DX SSB Contest.

This is a 'voice' contest, so if you aren't familiar  with the controlled mayhem that makes up radiosport activities, have a listen.  Activity will be on lower sideband (~1.8, 3.8, 7.2 MHz) and on upper sideband (~14.2, 21.2, 28.3 MHz).  You will hear stations in the US and Canada taking with stations everywhere else in the world.  Exchanges will be short (you'll hear callsigns plus a lot of '59 Ohio' or '59 1348', the prescribed information exchanges.)

If you'd like some insight into who makes up the top tier of stations (those that make the most total contacts, and manage to log the most countries in 48 hours), familiarize yourself with long time HamSCI member/supporter Tim Duffy, K3LR.  Attached is an article from the March, 2026 Radcom magazine, from the Radio Society of Great Britain (who kindly authorized distributing the PDF).  Learn a bit about Tim, his station, his operators, strategies, and why Tim enthusiastically supports young contesters and HamSCI - all in this 2-page article.

73 de Gary, AF8A

[Greg Beam]

Hi Gary,

Great post — the contest just wrapped and the propagation story from this weekend turned out to be pretty interesting.

I've been running a side project analyzing HF propagation using PSK Reporter, RBN, WSPR, and contest log data. Full disclaimer: I'm not a scientist, physicist, or mathematician by any stretch — I'm a principal engineer in the cloud hyperscaler space focused on performance engineering, data, and QA, plus a ham operator for 30+ years. But the data paints a pretty clear story from the weekend.

We captured 69 million PSK Reporter spots during the ARRL DX SSB window as a propagation proxy (same bands open, different modality). The headline: a geomagnetic storm developed mid-contest. Kp rose from 1.0 Saturday morning to 4.67 by Sunday afternoon — a natural before/after experiment.

What the data appears to show:
- 20m carried the contest both days with SFI at 135+
- 15m and 10m openings shortened on Day 2 as Kp climbed — high bands felt it
- 40m and 80m were largely unaffected — low bands shrugged off the disturbance
- Higher SFI this weekend (135 vs 110 during the CW weekend) gave better high-band conditions before the storm arrived

Ham-Stats
- https://ham-stats.com/contests/arrl-dx-cw-2026/
- https://ham-stats.com/contests/arrl-dx-ssb-2026/

The full analysis is in a Jupyter notebook with all the charts ( the earlier CW contest also available ):
- Notebook: https://github.com/IONIS-AI/ionis-jupyter/blob/main/notebooks/contest-arrl-dx-ssb-2026.ipynb
- Dataset (SQLite): https://sourceforge.net/projects/ionis-ai/files/contests/arrl-dx-ssb-2026.sqlite

We did the same for the CW weekend (Feb 21–22), where SSN dropped to zero during a G1 storm while SFI held at 110 — interesting decoupling.

All of this runs on a self-hosted home lab — a Threadripper 9975WX with ClickHouse ingesting 14.68 billion propagation observations (263 GiB on disk), a Mac Studio M3 Ultra for model training, and 10 Gbps DAC links between them. No cloud, no subscriptions — sovereign infrastructure for citizen science. More details on the lab and the IONIS project here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/greg-beam-179b233_sovereign-infrastructure-for-citizen-science-activity-7433050647903752192-hbGm

The goal is a reproducible propagation recap for every major contest weekend ( 2026 - maybe beyond ). The underlying datasets are all public on SourceForge. Always looking for feedback on what would be useful to the HamSCI community.

73 de Greg, KI7MT

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[Dr. Nathaniel A. Frissell Ph.D.]

Hi Greg,

I just looked at it quickly, but I love your analysis and Jupyter notebooks! They are great!

73 de Nathaniel W2NAF

From: ham...@googlegroups.com <ham...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Greg Beam <gbe...@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, March 9, 2026 at 6:21 PM
To: ham...@googlegroups.com <ham...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [HamSCI] Radiosport Leads to Very Busy Bands, K3LR Participates

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[Greg Beam]

Hi Nathaniel,

Thank you for the kind words! Coming from you, that means a lot. I'm glad you enjoyed the notebooks.

Gary, thanks for sharing that article on K3LR. Watching how those top-tier multi-op stations execute during the "controlled mayhem" of the ARRL DX SSB contest is exactly what makes building these data pipelines so fascinating. I don't recall ever having endured a full 48hr contest, which is the subject of another study I'm looking at -- Radiosport Operator Fatigue ( more on that later ).

73's
Greg, KI7MT