30 Ham Radio Contest Tips -- Update Multiplier Files

This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities.Today’s tip: Update Multiplier Files.One of the great things about contesting is that groups of people will go to all sorts of places on the planet to give the deserving a new multiplier. They have a lot of fun too, of course, but what happens is that right before a big contest, all sorts of new stations will come on the air with weird prefixes to boot.Usually, these stations coordinate with the people that maintain the "master files." They ensure that the prefixes and stations are associated with the right country for the contest. And that means that when you work that really loud station, your contesting program will know the correct multiplier because you've downloaded the latest multiplier file for the contest and installed it on your personal computer.Where to find the latest multiplier files? It depends on your contesting program. Right now, here are a few of the good links:WriteLog: http://www.writelog.com/downloads.htmAmateur Radio Country Files: http://www.country-files.com/Having the latest files for the contest means the chances of you missing or incorrectly assigning a multiplier from the contest is greatly reduced.Scot, K9JY