FT Challenge Home

The FT Challenge allows contesters and non-contesters to work each other seamlessly.  Non-contesters need not be aware that they are providing “contest” QSOs and their QSO needs are completely met.  The QSO exchange and messages are identical for both groups.

Thus, anyone in the FT sub-bands can work any station without regard to whether they are “in the contest”.  Grid Square and dB report are exchanged, but if a station calls a contest station with the Tx2 message (dB report), the contester will reply with the expected dB report, having already sent their Grid Square.  In this case, the contester will not have received the Grid but they still get a QSO point, despite the missing received Grid.  The contester does not get “distance QSO points” without the received Grid Square, however.

Scoring is distance-based with additional QSO points based on 3,000 km increments of distance between QSO partners.  In FT distance-based contests to date, the playing field is more level with top scores coming from all around the world.

The Classic Overlay category is available for those Single Operators who use only one radio.  This is an additional category which means that entrants must enter a Single Operator category and can optionally also enter the Class Overlay category, thus being in two categories for the same contest.

History

2011 – Ten-Meter RTTY Contest

Don, AA5AU, and Ed, W0YK, initiated the Ten-Meter RTTY Contest on the first full weekend of December.  This served as a warm-up for the ARRL Ten-Meter Contest the following weekend on CW and SSB, as well as the ARRL RTTY Roundup in early January.  At the bottom of the solar cycle, though, activity was obviously low.

2018 – FT Roundup

When FT8 was introduced in July 2017 and explosively absorbed most of the HF activity outside of DXpeditions and Contests, the contest evolved into the FT8 Roundup in December 2018.  This was the first FT8 contest and served to test FT contesting feasibility.  FT4 was subsequently introduced into WSJT-X and added to the contest with the name changing to FT Roundup.

As with all FT contests, the FT Roundup participants had some frustration with non-contesters calling in and sending Grid Square and SNR for exchange.    Conflictingly, the FT Roundup exchange was RST and State (or, VE area or serial number for DX stations).  This was frustrating for both the contester and non-contester, especially since there is no easy way to communicate via FT modes to sort out the differences.  Nimble contesters could interrupt their QSO message sequencing and send an Alternate Message with dB report, but they would never get a QTH or serial number out of the non-contester.

Even in FT contests that used Grid Square as the exchange, many non-contesters started with Tx2, thus sending only dB report.  The absence of SNR from the contester and the (often) absence of Grid Square from the non-contester resulted in similar frustration.  FT contests omitted SNR because it saved a message cycle which seemed appropriate for a contest environment.

In practice, saving a message cycle per QSO was insignificant to the overall FT QSO rate due to missed cycles or missed messages requiring repeats.

2024 – FT Challenge

The FT Roundup was replaced with the FT Challenge to address this contester/non-contester conflict and make all active stations, contesters or not, available for the contest participants to work invisibly and transparently.  For the small price of the dB report message, everyone can work any active station and the contest activity is fully integrated with non-contest FT activity.  Everyone benefits and frustration should be reduced.