SARL HF Digital Contest

The digital leg of SARL's August HF series: three hours of FT4 and FT8 on 20, 40 and 80 m, on the second Sunday.

Rules at mysarl.org.zaThe rules are the sponsor's. This page holds the dates and the facts.

When it runs

Second Sunday of August

1300Z → 1600Z Sunday

Times are UTC, as the sponsor states them.

Next runnings

1300Z Sun 8 Aug → 1600Z Sun 8 Aug · 3h2027
in 311 days
Logs due 1600Z Fri 13 Aug
1300Z Sun 13 Aug → 1600Z Sun 13 Aug · 3h2028
in 682 days
Logs due 1600Z Fri 18 Aug
1300Z Sun 12 Aug → 1600Z Sun 12 Aug · 3h2029
in 1046 days
Logs due 1600Z Fri 17 Aug
1300Z Sun 11 Aug → 1600Z Sun 11 Aug · 3h2030
in 1410 days
Logs due 1600Z Fri 16 Aug

Operating

Modes: FT8/FT4 FT4, FT8
Bands: 80m40m20m
20, 40 and 80 m. SSB 14 125-14 350, 7 063-7 100 and 7 130-7 200, 3 603-3 650 and 3 700-3 800 kHz; CW 14 020-14 030, 7 000-7 040, 3 510-3 560 kHz. The segments 7 100-7 130 and 3 651-3 699 kHz are contest free.
Exchange: Minimally a signal strength report and RRR/73/RRR73 and a serial number in each direction between the two parties.
Logs: ADIF, Cabrillo or MS Excel · due 5 days after the end
Who can enter: Anyone, anywhere.
The aim is 'to contact as many amateurs in Southern Africa as possible', but the scoring table's Area 9 is 'Stations in the rest of the world', so entry is not restricted to South Africa. This corrects an earlier assumption in this catalog that SARL contests were ZS-only, which was flagged 'Confirm' and turned out to be wrong.

Where this comes from

Checked against the sponsor: Yes. The rule on this page was read off SARL's own published rules. Link last confirmed 2026-08-19.
What the source says: 2026 SARL Contest Manual Version 1.1 (2025-12-15), mysarl.org.za: '2.2. HF Digital Contest on (2nd Sunday) 9 August 2026 13:00 UTC to 16:00 UTC'. Modes: '3.3. FT4 and FT8 as Digital modes: The default frequencies for FT4 and FT8 in WSJT-X for the three contest frequencies of 20m, 40m and 80m.' Exchange: '5.2. FT4 and FT8 minimally a signal strength report and RRR/73/RRR73 and a serial number in each direction between the two parties.' Checked against SARL's own published dates as well as its rules: SARL publishes SARL-Contests-2026-Calendar.ics on the same page, whose times carry TZID="South Africa Standard Time" (a fixed +0200, no DST -- its own X-CALSTART confirms 09:00 local as 07:00Z). That calendar is an independent second source for every date encoded here.
Recorded caveats: Starts an hour earlier than the Phone and CW legs -- 13:00 UTC, not 14:00 -- which is SARL's own wording and not a transcription slip. log_deadline_days is 5, which is the right DAY and not the right hour: SARL states 'by 21:59 UTC on Friday', and the contest ends at 17:00 UTC on the Sunday five days before, so the engine's derived log_due lands at 17:00 rather than 21:59. The day is exact in every year because both ends are tied to the same Sunday. The five hours are recorded here rather than papered over.

Something wrong? How to report it — a link to the sponsor's own page is all it takes.

Take it with you

Add to Google Calendar Subscribe (iCal)This record as JSON

Add to Google Calendar puts the next running in as a single event. It is one event, not a subscription — come back for the one after it, or use the feed below.

Subscribe (iCal) carries this contest's runnings for the next twelve months as UTC instants and keeps them current. Apple Calendar, Outlook and Thunderbird take this address directly. Its identifiers are stable across deploys, so re-subscribing does not duplicate anything: https://contestclock.com/api/ics?id=sarl-hf-digital

Google has no working one-click subscribe. Paste that address into Settings → Add calendar → From URL. Google then polls it on its own schedule, often 8–24 hours, and that cannot be forced — so use Add to Google Calendar above if you want the next running in your calendar now.