Announcing the USA250 Award

It is also dependant on the people you contact. Contesters and special event ops for the most part do electronic loggings and uploading to LoTW and QRZ Log is a snap. You can work 100 rag chewers and will probably have very poor electronic confirmation rate. But make 100 QSO's in a contest and you will have a very high confirmation rate.

I was pretty confident that I would be qualified for this after the ARRL RTTY Roundup contest this past weekend. I had over 500 QSO's. It took a couple days but the confirmations came in to put me over the top. More will still come in over the next few days.

 

+1 to this. 256 contacts in just over two hours, I was averaging 1 contact every 32 seconds during Parks on the Air Activation i used to get my award.

You can usually count on about 60% confirmation rate as well, via QRZ and then with a sync and re-import from LOTW, but I fell a bit short of that target number. In the age of broad digital logging, confirmation of contacts has never been easier.

 

A nice award that I'm also going for, so far I'm up to 31/250, will keep pecking away for a few months, the only mode I use is SSB for all my contacts
hope to hear you on the bands soon, best 73s HNY 2026 M1EMC

 

After 56-years on the air, I found that too many 'old-timers' don't even bother to QSL anymore. I am an old-timer and QSL 100% because both newcomers and contesters need it! There's just no excuse except laziness. You're right, CW, RTTY, SSB are the way for this type of award. However, I'm still not sure how that many awards qualified in that short of a time period. Oh well, I will get there soon myself.

 

THANK YOU DAVE. I didn't imply cheating but more interested in HOW but you and others explained things quite well. Best 73 to all and Happy New Year!

 

I noticed the same thing for my original mixed mode award. Then a short time later when more confirmations came in from the RTTY contest this past weekend it bumped up to over 250 for both Mixed and Digital.

 

I did a survey on POTA Facebook and probably 75 percent log with at least QRZ from the survey results on Facebook. Who knows overall. Of my 1500 or so contacts 1000 or so are confirmed and 90 percent of what I do is POTA hunting.
Mike N4CGR

 

I track all of the details of my activations and I have found that over the past year of activating for POTA, that my confirmation rate within a few hours of completing an activation is around 40% on QRZ. After about 24 hours from when I activate a park and upload my log to QRZ that I get into the 70% rate that you mention. I went into this event knowing that and aimed to net 630 contacts to reach that 40% rate of 250 confirmations. By the time I had 589 contacts though, I had reached the 250 required for the award which took me about 6 hours starting on the morning of the 1st.

 

I'm at 150 out of 250 so far, and I have really only been working in 10 band 12 days of QRZ, and I'm at 9, 8, and 7 days per band, so 3 to 5 more days to complete each band. I'll be pretty close to 250 by then if not over.

 

Put in 363 Q's in the RTTY Round Up this last weekend. RTTY operators are usually quick to load log to LOTW and QRZ, but only a few so far. I'm still hoping that some of the folks will upload soon. In the meantime, I'll plug away at it; because it's another good time on the radio!

 

Seeing stations calling "CQ 250" and call sign on 20M FT8. When I try to call, WSJT QSY's my radio 14.250 Mhz. First time I've seen this. Expect I missed something.

 

I worked 378 Stations on several bands between January 1, 2026 11:07 utc and Jan. 3, 2026 12:03 utc and kept uploading my
N3FJP log intermittently {Usually every 10 contacts} to LOTW and about once an hour would download from LOTW to QRZ.
Finally the QRZ Awards page showed I was eligible for the 250 QRZ Award.

Maybe many of the Stations I worked were doing the same thing. I did not think to start at 00:01 utc Jan. 1st, 2026 duh.
#34 K2HAT 2026-01-03

 

Nothing like a good ARRL contest to help with awards....
from RTTY-RU, uploaded 1500 q's... 776 confirmed as of this am,
just a tad bit better than 50% verified/confirmed...