This past weeked was the RSGB Commonwealth contest, also known as the BERU Contest (BERU stands for British Empire Radio Union). This is a fun contest from Canada as lots and lots of good DX shows up from the far flung corners of the Commonwealth. The fun part is, thanks to a small disagreement with the crown back around 1776, our friends in the US don’t get to play in this contest. That really cuts down on the competition for all that juicy DX, making it a lot easier to work.

The contest is only 24 hours long, but generally the last few hours are kind of slow, after everyone in the UK has gone to bed. There is an interesting 12 hour category in the contest, which introduces an element of strategy in picking your off times if you choose to enter in that class. As well, there is the so-called restricted category, where you essentially can use only simple wire antennas – no beams.

I decided to play in the 12-hr restricted section.

Unfortunately, I think this year I picked the wrong off times. On the one hand, I needed to spend some time on the low bands to pick up some multipliers. But the tradeoff was being off the high bands while propagation was still pretty good. As a result, I don’t think my score was as good as it could have been.

The local competition seems to have shaped up like this in terms of QSOs:

Rich, VE3KI is a tough guy to beat.

Well, I may have got the strategy wrong, but at least I was rewarded with some good DX – 9J2BO (a BERU regular), 5X1NA, 5H3EE, VU2PTT and 7Q7BP were among the best that showed up. And of course all the familiar participants from G-land.

Always a fun contest, and looking forward to next year already.