The Review of 2024

Another year has passed and we hope everyone reading this had a great start on the new and current year. In the past year ARK turned 101 years old and is still going strong. As we’re just in the beginning of 2025 not much interesting has happened in terms of radio related events for us. Instead, we thought it would be interesting to have a look at the past year through the lens of our club. This post, (in post), turned out to be much longer than what we first anticipated, so it had to be split in twain. Part one will focus on activities around the club itself, and part 2 will focus more on the QSOs of the past year.

Recruits

Chronologically, the year starts with the spring semester, and ends with the fall semester. Conveniently, both of these start with the recruitment of new members so maybe it’s a good fit to begin here. At the beginning of the year, there was a huge number of applicants and the board could proudly announce a total of 17 new recruits! As there is nothing stopping ARK from recruiting more people outside of the recruitment period, 6 more members were accepted in later as well. During the fall semester we still had many wonderful applicants but this time we had to limit the amount to 16, which brings the yearly total to 39. We hope everyone felt welcome in our the club and will enjoy radio years to come!

Spring Cabin Trip

An ARK tradition since 2020 is to do a spring radio cabin trip to welcome our new members. This year, we went to Oppdal, where we stayed at “Omegahytten”. The weather forecast offered lots of rain, snow, wind and heavy avalanche warnings. Despite considerations to postpone it, we all ended up at the cabin Friday evening for taco, followed by card games and board games. We also set time aside for an indoor exercise in tuning vertical antennas, fun for both new and old members!

On Saturday, we woke up to fresh snow and sun, ready for a day of radio outdoors. We split into two groups: one that set up a makeshift dipole by the cabin and one that ventured up the nearby ski slopes. Usually we would have considered a SOTA-trip, but the avalanche warnings were still in place. Both groups participated in the EU DX context, with a particular focus on letting new recruits try the radio. After a while, the wind increased, and the skiers went home to the others for dinner and another social evening.

The Sunday contained no planned activities, but we had to clean and move out of the cabin. In addition, a few of us went for a nice ski trip before going home to Trondheim.

National Field Day

The main radio event of the year once again happened in early September. The QTH “Samatun” has served us well ever since 2019, maybe the footprints of our antennas can be spotted in the dirt for years to come by now. With the large number of recruits this fall, it wasn’t surprising that 25 Field Day-rookies joined this year, with 45 OPs in all (and 2 doggies). There weren’t even enough beds inside the cabin, with the option to sleep outside becoming mandatory for several of the participants. We were at least lucky with the weather.

With antennas steadily getting up and functional, there were a few knockbacks however. A few of the amplifiers brought along suddenly had a few technical issues, which put the shack on an hour delay behind contest start. LA1K has been a steady 2nd place achiever the last couple of years, behind only LA1QRO, but this year, we unfortunately got 4th place, behind NRRL groups Oslo LA4O and Trondheim LA2T. ARK affiliates LA1AFP was securely defeated though, which ended up solidly at 6th place (with author LB5PI representing).

But, with the final results months away from ruining anyone’s mood, everyone seemed to have a great time and Field Day did what it usually does: introduce the newest members to our club and radio. Some of the YLs got very confident of their operating skills after Field Day as well (one of which got 312 of the total 866 QSOs!), and went ahead and purchased the license “LA1YLS”. It will premier at the YL-OM Contest in February, so stay on the lookout for the Young Ladies next month.

Contests

One of our favourite parts of the amateur radio hobby is radio-sport. In 2024 we participated in a total of 27 contests, mostly from our home QTH at Samfundet. We did two serious 48 hours participations where we had an operator on the radio for the whole contest duration, CQ WPX RTTY and CQ WW RTTY. This was a great success, with over 2.000 QSOs in CQ WPX (a new ARK record) and over 1.500 QSOs in CQ WW RTTY. Usually we would also have joined the equivalent SSB contests, but CQ WPX SSB ended on the easter break and the most eager of us joined CQ WW SSB and participated under the LN8W callsign

In most other contests we opted for a more casual approach of just operating the convenient hours of the day; after sleeping in – but before alcohol gets involved.

LN8W Contest Station

For the large international contests, LN8W has built up a competitive station way down south, just outside of Oslo. As ARKs QTH isn’t the most optimal for reaching the top of the leaderboards anymore, invites from LN8W has led to a few trips down recently, which you can read about here. Usually CQ WW SSB is a very popular contest with the slots at the contest station already booked well in advance, but this year was the exception to the rule. With slots open and four additional operators joining from LA1K, the manned hours became less for everyone involved, which hopefully made up for some of our lack of experience!

Even still, the most eager operators were assigned to the shack for 34 out of 48 hours with max 4 hours sleep and up to 7 hours continuously. This seemed too intense for us so we got, by request, a reduced operation schedule. The conditions were awesome, in particular the first 24 hours. In total, we claimed a total of 15.505.875 points, which will likely be a new Norwegian record for CQ WW SSB. We had a lot of fun at Rakkestad. Operating with antennas this good gives another dimension to contesting compared to omnidirectional antennas.

CW

2024 was also the first time in years for our club that many new CW operators were able to securely get a QSO in the log without needing any decoding software. Interests in CW and coursing have fluctuated a bit over the last couple of years, but this year, the skill had reached good enough levels to pull through. The first QSO in the daily log was completed in early February and steadily grew over the course of the year. LA1K was also to be heard on ARI DX, CQ WPX, CQ WW and ARRL 10m, with a total number of 5 OPs in the log. The club’s LCWO group also had 6 new members join by the end of the year. We hope the trend will continue for years to come and that our club will have a rising amount of operators doing CW on the air.

New Licensees

As usual, LA1K arranged two license courses this year, once per semester. With radio trips and Field Day being wonderful ways to get people eager to get their own licenses, we had a bunch of people who signed up for the courses this year. The radio exams in recent years have gotten a lot tougher in terms of what you need to know, and several questions brought up from footnotes in the course book are straight up ridiculous. However, some people persevered and passed the tough exam! We’ll once again congratulate LB0BJ, LB0CJ, LB0DJ, LB0EJ and LB0FJ from the spring exam, and LB2BK, LB2CK and LB2DK from the fall!

Summits on the Air

We’ve had a growing interest in SOTA the past few years, but 2024 set a new record in the number of activations. If we count all operators on all activations, we count a total of 70, on 27 unique summits. This may not be much compared to the top SOTA-activators in Norway, but it’s not bad for casual SOTA-activators like us.

In September, two of us went to the SOTA-gathering of SOTA Norway to meet some of the top SOTA-activators. This weekend included several activations, much Summit-to-summit contacts, some compleetes, lots of fun and a nice and social opportunity to meet others with the same hobby.

In particular, we did more SOTA-activations in the summer compared to the previous years. Our most popular activation was the 1. May trip to Storheia, where we were a total of 12 ARKers, including 5 with license.

Beacons

There’s been a work in progress since fall 2020 to restore the building where we keep our radio beacons, at the top of Vassfjellet in Melhus. The project really kicked off in spring 2021, but the last year has really seen then project resembling something natural, and not something out of a Picasso notebook. The restoration of the building is still a work in progress, even though most of the dirty work being out of the way. We hope to see the project being completed in the summer of 2025, and hope to see the four beacons on air again at the same time. The previous article on the site goes into more detail on this subject for those who are interested!

Backlog

We’ve now summarised a lot of the year, mainly what we were able to get done through most of it. As there’s still plenty to do, we thought it would be fitting to conclude with a few things that’s still a work in progress.

Apart from the antennas mentioned in this earlier post, the portable amps at Field day is also in need of repairs due to FD 2025.

In our archives there’s also a work in progress that’s steadily been worked on through 2024 (and several years in the works already), which is converting our paper logs to digital ADIF-files. Apart from making searches way easier, it also makes for interesting statistics and greatly improves our QSL-service. And for those who are eagerly awaiting a LA100K QSL-card, this is currently being designed and will hopefully be sent out during the spring of 2025!

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That’s it for part one of the 2024 recap, hope you made it this far down! As previously mentioned, we’ll have a look at the QSO-statistics of the past year in next week’s article. Hope you’ll find it as interesting as we do!