State QSO Party Data After operating mobile in the 2013 INQP and feeling pretty good about the activity level, I began to wonder how this QSO party compared in activity to other state and provincial QSO parties. I spent an hour one night doing some web research and came up with this table. If you have corrections please send them my way. • The “Logs Received” number was either taken directly from a number reported on each web site or from manually counting either a list of logs received or stations listed in the contest results. If I had to do the counting I likely made errors as I was going pretty fast but the reported number should still be a pretty good gauge of the level of activity in each contest. I could not find a Logs Received number for AK, ND and SD. • All the data is a snapshot as of June 2, 2013. So, for Logs Received in particular, the data for QSO parties that are still collecting logs will quickly be out of date. • The INQP is sponsored by the HDXCC and, each year, club members debate the merits of allowing county line operations and allowing single op stations to use packet or spotting assistance. So, I tried to determine how each party handled this feature. It appears to be split pretty evenly. At least 24 of the 48 parties allow county line operations (actually, 24 of 47 since Hawaii does not have county lines) and 32 of the 48 allow single op entries to use packet. There were a number of QSO parties for which I either could not find rules or for which the rules were not clear on these details. Conclusion: I’m guessing many hams try to participate in their state’s QSO party out of loyalty and parochial interest. My conclusion from this data would be that if you want to participate in a state QSO party where there is a lot of activity you could not do better than the first Saturday in May. The INQP, 7QP and New England QP run concurrently on this date and, per the chart below, have well over 1100 combined logs submitted, with probably even more stations active beyond that. Granted, there’s probably some overlap with the same station submitting the same log to all 3 contests, but it still seems clear that this is the best weekend to operate a state QP if you want lots of activity.