By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
May 7, 2010

This week, Surfin’ checks the calendar to see what’s brewing in the contest ham radio world.

Next Saturday evening, I will attend the 18th Annual Dayton Contest Dinner (thanks to my intrepid editor for inviting me). I admit that I need to remove the rust from my contesting skills and I hope that the dinner will provide a solvent for some of that iron oxide.

In the meantime, I visited the Contest Calendar Web site of Bruce Horn, WA7BNM. The site bills itself as providing “detailed information about Amateur Radio contests throughout the world, including their scheduled dates/times, rules summaries, log submission information and links to the official rules as published by the contest sponsors.”

The site’s contents lists a lot of contests, many that I have never heard of, so I assume its coverage is comprehensive. The site provides a number of ways to find a contest. For example, you can view lists of contests by date or you can view lists of all the CW, QRP or state QSO party contests. When you find a contest of interest, click on its link and the site brings up all the details about the event.

A fellow Mac ham, Norman Wald, W9VQ, alerted me to WA7BNM’s site because you can customize it to display specific contests and types of contests, you can subscribe to an RSS feed, and best of all, it has a Mac iCal calendar interface, as well as an Microsoft Outlook calendar interface.

Until next time, keep on surfin’!

Editor’s note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, looks forward to meeting Surfin’ readers at another Dayton Hamvention. To contact Stan, send him e-mail at wa1lou@arrl.org or add comments to his blog.