A few Tips from the MAD River SS Handbook

Marsh KA5M pointed me to a couple of Blogs

One of which contains a note about the K4JNY station dismantling
this is Big news to us as they are the ones that had been bumping us from first place in our division and keeping us down in the region box !
Read more here

the important part is..............

" I'm gathering things I need from the piles of stuff from the K4JNY station teardown, "

The other Blog contains the Mad River Radio Club Sweepstakes Handbook
which I highly recommend every SS Op read

here is some important excerpts from the from of the manuscript.....
(the first example most of us LA folks know but read on....)
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It is important to become familiar with the names, territories, and official abbreviations for the
various ARRL sections because there are opportunities for ambiguities and confusion, which lead
to errors in logging. For example:

• “Los Angeles County” is a section and most people associate Los Angeles with “LA”. However
“LA” is the abbreviation for the state of Louisiana; Los Angles County is “LAX”. Your logging
program will most likely accept “LA” as the section for a W6 since a callsign can appear from
just about any section these days. But keep in mind that when the ARRL scores your log, it
counts “LA” as Louisiana and if that’s wrong, you lose the QSO.

Other sections with similar
names are Orange County (ORG) and the state of Oregon (OR), San Diego County (SDG) and
the state of South Dakota (SD). Ambiguous state combinations abound: Arkansas (AR) and
Arizona (AZ), Alaska (AK) and Alabama (AL), and the quadruple-header of Michigan (MI),
Minnesota (MN), Missouri (MO) and Mississippi (MS).

• The California sections “Sacramento Valley” and “Santa Clara Valley” sound very similar, but
the abbreviation for the former is “SV” and the latter is “SCV”. Transpose the two and you lose
the QSO as well.

• It’s not uncommon for a Canadian station in one of the sections comprised of combined
provinces to give his province as the exchange rather than the section name. In SS most
logging programs will not accept a province abbreviation which is not a section. Most people
will substitute the section name; so if you hear a NB, NS or PEI substitute MAR and for YT, NWT or NU the abbreviation NT should be substituted.

• Hawaii, and all of the US possessions in the Pacific Ocean are grouped under the Pacific
section, abbreviation “PAC”. In the Caribbean Ocean, Puerto Rico is a section (abbreviation
“PR”) and the Virgin Islands are a section (abbreviation “VI”). Guantanamo Bay (KG4) is
included as part of VI.

Listed on the next page in this manuscript are the names and official abbreviations for
the eighty ARRL sections.
Become familiar with the names and abbreviations, and perhaps we can avoid
having a busted exchange deleted from our SS log.
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