Welcome to my Pa QSO Party page. The PA QSO Party is one of the best state QSO parties in the country. Run by the good folks at the Nittany ARC, in State College, PA, it always proves to be one of the friendliest contests you'll find.

From this page, you can view the data for any county, just by clicking on the county map, or a link to the left. At the bottom, are links to a handy map which shows the difference between EPA & WPA, and the maps of the rarest counties for the last 12 years

A Little History
About 20 years ago, Allen, WI8T), and I were planning to come to PA, to run portable for the party. After consulting previous years results, and talking with Doug, W3HDH, we chose INN for our first attempt. That weekend in 1987, it poured rain most of the time. we operated from an open pavillion, and slept in a tent. The high temp for that cold, rainy, weekend felt like about 48°. Despite the inhospitable conditions we had fun, and resolved to return the next year. It was about four years later that we wised up and found an indoor QTH.

The Database
Around that time, I began tabulating the total points per county, and storing it in a database. This data helped us to plan the next years effort, as well as helping us predict which counties would likely be the next "rare ones". When the web came along, it seemed perfectly logical to post the data there for everyones benefit. I didn't let the fact that I knew nothing about HTML deter me.
Using Front Page, I constructed a set of 75 pages, and uploaded them to qsl.net. I quickly learned why "Friends don't let friends use Front Page", and took some classes to learn HTML. Updating these pages every year take about 6 hours, over the course of a week, and the data is somewhat basic. Any change I make to the data layout requires updating 67 pages.