We will meet on the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend (September 3, 2023) and hope you will be with us for our annual Radiosport event. Full information for our annual TNQP Contest can be found under Rules dropdown tab.
Our bonus station is K4TCG and will be active, so be sure to work it.
We will also have mobile stations activating many of the 95 counties in Tennessee.
Tennessee QSO Party 
Labor Day weekend is a terrible weekend to have the TQP!!! People will be traveling, attending local functions, visiting, having visitors, and it is the last holiday weekend of the summer. ARGH! Please rethink this.
If memory is correct it was the same last year. No way I nor many others can participate during this weekend.
Glenn,
Sorry the TNQP does not align well with your schedule. Its a great event with nice awards. Do join this fun radio event if you change your mind. 73 de AC6ZM
I don’t mean to ask a stupid question but I’m new to contesting here and would like to be a part of this. Do I have to be a member of the TN Contest Group to give out the TN county I live in? Or is it open for any TN station? I don’t want to mess things up for others that are participating by giving out my county if it won’t count to help them.
My second year, and the 2022 contest was crazy fun again- but different. Not only were we all dealing with rain and thunderstorms in most of the state, but a moderate (K=6) geomagnetic storm as well! 20m and down were all just…gone… Too bad, SSB QRP at 40m is pretty much one hop and done, I cant get much further west than Dallas on good days. On 20 and 15 I can get out to the west coast (sometimes) – not to be this year. Anyway, I had to hunt for multiplier states I usually don’t have any problems getting into. After sunset, and a soaked lawn increasing ground conductivity, I’m pretty sure my 40m pattern flattened out a bit and the ionosphere cooperated enough to open up New England and a few great plains states. Remarkable how patterns changed through the day. Rewarding in its own way.
As a long aside/mini-review, I highly recommend N3FJP’s TN QSO Party’s specific logging tool. I tried all of the TN Contest Group’s recommendations, and after playing with a few of them last week, this was the winner for me. Super easy to set up, doesn’t try to be a “do everything” program, easy to use, and the interface is awesome. It shows you everything you need for the contest, tracks all of your multipliers, and even gives you a QSO/hr rate over 60 and 20 min to see how you’re trending. Well worth the whopping $8 for the isolated TN QSO package alone. You don’t need to hook your rig up to it, but if you do it will log your frequency automatically. The hardest part is setting up your com ports – just remember to do it in pairs (like Com3-Com4) and it works like a charm. I did it “accidentally” and was pleasantly rewarded with automatic frequency logging. When the contest was over, it spat out a Cabrillo file that uploaded flawlessly. Less than 5 minutes prep time to send my log, I just filled out the fields like “name” and “power”. Just be aware that while the download of the logging software is instant, and you pay with paypal, N3FJP has to send you the key by e-mail. I got mine in less than 2 hrs on a Friday, but I would advise buying it a week out. I spent more money on the coffee I drank Sunday than this program!
Anyway thanks to the organizers, beautiful job with last year and looking forward to see how thinks shake out again in 2022.
I normally go to Monroe County (from just north of Atlanta) just to participate in this. My family is from the Tri-Cities area and I lived and worked in Knoxville for years so TN is sorta’ a second home state for me.
Year before last, 2021, I ended up with two other Georgia based operators at Buck Bald (kb4kft, n3ack, w4jew), perfect weather, had lots of fun.
Last year (2022) storms at the bald prevented us from setting up there, it is a bald after all and even a 16ft 20m vertical would be the highest point. We set up at a roadside picnic shelter just north of the Turtletown, TN, post office and stayed wet most of the day. Still fun.
This year, 2023, I am going to shoot for the bald again and hope for good weather.
I do GA QSO Party, TN QSO Party, and AL QSO Party. Drive into the state for them, enjoy them all – but TN has become my favorite.
I thought 2023 was a great year for the contest. Decent weather, no major solar storms, better conditions than 2022. I added my POTA trail-ready 40m NVIS EFHW only 15’ up to try and get more TN QSO’s; and thanks to some severe storms we had in Knoxville my trusty, $35 dollar low-power MFJ EFHW needed to be re-installed. I was able to get hoisted to almost 60’ with a NE/SW broadside, and it seemed to have less noise on it after this redeploy and some basic maintenance of tightening connectors and coax seal replacement.
As it turned out, I more than 2x’ed my TN counties for either previous year- but not because of the NVIS. It turned out to be a dud. Close contacts in Asheville NC and Blount co on 40m reported signals 2-s levels lower on the 15’ high trail EFHW than on the re-employed MFJ, even though the MFJ’s SWR was a bit worse (1.6-1.8) than the trail -friendly Par End-Fedz I wasted 2 hrs tuning. No, all of my contacts were on the much higher 60’ antenna. So much for the NVIS theory.
I noticed a lot more TN stations hunting me than in either previous years, and I heard one on 20m (a first) to get a double multiple from Blount Co. This was the first year I had any appreciable success on 20m, and it got me a few extra states; but most of my contacts were on 40m as usual. As a qrp station, I have a really hard time being heard west of the AR line on 40m, but I got into the north-east fairly well -probably because of antenna orientation.
Overall, I thought 40m seemed hot with TN QSO party stations and a really busy contest that had operators calling out for QSO’s until the moment the contest ended. Exciting.