At one of the recent OVMRC meetings, our president had mentioned the Triple Play Worked All States award after seeing one of the locals, in this case Brian Rawlings VE3QN, appear on the recent recipients list. Being interested in paper chasing myself, I logged in to my LoTW account as soon as I got home than evening and checked to see what my stats were. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that I had actually completed the CW and Digital portions of the award, and was 5 short on SSB. That should be easy, right? As many of you have probably experienced, the last five are always way, way harder to get than the first five. Why that is, I don't know, but it's one of those immutable laws of the universe.

So I worked out a plan and looked at the available tools to help me in my the final stretch of this challenge. One of those tools, which I hadn't previously used, was Ham Alert. This is a great resource for DX and award chasers, which lets you setup triggers that send you alerts when the parameters match. For example, I setup an alert for those five missing states, on HF, on SSB, being spotted from North America, with the spotted station being a known LoTW user. I also regularly checked the POTA spotting page for any activators in those states, and tried to figure out which bands and times would work best to reach those states. I was on the hunt, and I was not going to come home empty handed.

However, It was difficult and I was getting discouraged. Although I had managed to get three of those missing states with hard work and skills, there were two that remained elusive, Maine and Vermont. They are so close and yet so far away. But one day, as I was looking up contest dates for Hugo's Thursday night net (you do check in, right?), I came across what would prove to be exactly what I needed: the ARRL Sweepstakes. I am what one would call a casual contester, mostly participating with the ulterior motive of working DX or rare stations. And in this case, my sole reason for participating would be to get those two last ones needed for the Triple Play (and maybe also to further my 5 band Worked All States stats… but that is for another time).

As soon as the contest started, I swam across the 80 metre and 40 metre bands. Since it was dark and because those states are so close by, these would be my best bet. And I was right! Not too long after starting my hunt, I was actually able to work a few hams from both Maine and Vermont. You need to have insurance contacts you know, in case one makes a mistake or takes a while to log online. With those contacts in hand, I decided to continue playing around the bands and had a lot of fun working US hams from all over.

A few days later, after I had uploaded my logs, those final confirmations came in! What a treat it was to be able to sumbit the application after such a fun hunt. Because that's what it is, a hunt. That is what award chasing is. And you have to attack it with the mindset of a hunter, and learn every intricate detail of the behaviours and habits of your prey, so that you can be at the right place at the right time.

73, Ante VA2BBW

Appears in: Rambler Vol.66 Issue 5