WRTC 2018 teams produce amazing contact totals despite poor conditions

A crack team of contesters from Lithuania has won the gold medal in World Radiosport Team Championship 2018 (WRTC 2018), held over the weekend in Germany.

Operating as Y81N, Gedas Lucinskas, LY9A, and Mindis Jukna, LY4L, topped the real-time scoreboard for much of the event, which is held as a competition within a contest in conjunction with the IARU HF Championship. Lucinskas and Jukna had ended up in sixth place during WRTC 2014, held in New England. They posted a final score of 5,690,685 points, logging 5,139 contacts, with a heavy emphasis on CW.

Conditions during the weekend competition were mediocre at best.

Taking second place to the pleasure of the German sponsors was the Y81A team of Manfred Wolf, DJ5MW, and Stefan von Baltz, DL1IAO, with 5,273,488 points, with 4,936 contacts, a majority on CW. They placed third in a nail-biting finale for the bronze at WRTC 2014. The mostly German audience gave Wolf and Baltz a huge ovation.

In the third spot this time around was the WRTC 2014 defending champion team of Dan Craig, N6MJ, and Chris Hurlbut, KL9A, who operated as Y82V, and racked up a final tally of 4,891,710 points, heavily weighted toward CW.

The WRTC 2014 second-place team of Rastislav Hrnko, OM3BH, and Jozef Lang, OM3GI, from the Slovak Republic landed in 10th place at WRTC 2018.

This year’s first-place team scored nearly 1.5 million fewer points but 567 more contacts than the WRTC 2014 first-place team of N6MJ and KL9A. Overall, the competitors logged more than 300,000 contacts during the 24-hour event.

“The excitement of the competitors is at least as high as that of the spectators watching the [Live] Scoreboard,” WRTC 2018 said as the event was starting to wind down. “But what distinguishes viewers from contesters is that the spectators can see the current position of all of the stations — the contest teams do not.”

Determining the final results of WRTC 2018 involved an extensive log-checking process, based in part on comparisons between IARU HF Contest logs submitted to WRTC 2018 for that purpose. Final results for all competing teams have been posted on the WRTC 2018 website.

The father-son Y87B team of Jeff Briggs, K1ZM, and Patrick Briggs, KK6ZM, won the SSB Leader Award. The CW leaders, operating as Y83O, were Tonno Vahk, ES5TV, and Toivo Hallikivi, ES2RR, of Estonia.

Claiming the award for the most accurate log — which was said to be very close — was the Y86V team of Leo Slavov, OR2F, and Pascal Lierman, ON5RA, of Belgium. They made 39 logging errors.

Youth Team Award winners were Alexandru Mancas, YO8TTT, and Leo Kharchenko, UT5GW, who landed in 14th place overall. There were three youth teams for competitors aged 25 or younger. The youngest WRTC 2018 competitor was 14.

Jannsen said he’s looking forward to WRTC 2022, which will take place in Bologna, Italy, as announced at the closing ceremony.

Our thanks to the The American Radio Relay League for the above report