In the immediate aftermath of the NRAU-Baltic 2026 contest, I have been honored with the opportunity to post a few questions to one of the ham radio contesting rock stars in the Baltic region - Kristjan Kass ES7GM 🇪🇪. His family lineage goes back to his grandfather, ES7GT, later - his father ES7GN and present, Kris’s nephew, ES2VERQ entering the fourth generation of the hobby.

Today Kristjan runs the fully equipped ES7A station and shares his own experience on the NRAU-Baltic Contest 2026.

Interview conducted by Simonas Kareiva LY2EN 🇱🇹

S: Kris, you are known for doing ham radio for most of your life. In 2026, where do you stand exactly with the hobby, after so many years into it?

Kristjan: As you might suspect, I’m a competitive person by nature. After learning CW and doing RTTY as early as 6-7 years old and having those local mini contests where I participated, I started wondering how the other guys are doing better than me. Since then, I truly enjoy contesting, the main focus is purely on contesting. I don’t collect any DXCC, I don’t really chase any IOTA,POTA,SOTA etc. I just like to push myself during the contests. And since I love contesting so much, the other part of the hobby is to build the station. As everyone knows, the higher the towers, the better. So here I am (in 2026) trying to follow that strategy.

S. NRAU-Baltic 2026 just ended. What is your relationship with the NRAU-Baltic contest since the first time you’ve jumped on it? Can you compare your experience back then to how it went for you in 2026?

Kristjan: I honestly don’t remember the very first contest in NRAU-Baltic, but it was at least 20 years ago. Not really sure of my result back then, but the ones I remember are from early 2010. I would say that 2010s were the golden era of the NRAU-Baltic contest. It was the time where representing your country actually meant something and people were trying their best to get a better result in the country standings. This was probably the time when we constantly had over 300 participants each year. One exception is the first covid year with 362 logs. But everything after is on a solid decline. The biggest drop has been from the Scandinavian side. There has never been more logs from Estonia compared to Finland up until 2024 when for the first time in history ES had more logs than OH, for example.

S: You have quite an impressive setup at ES7A. Which driving factors can still decide if you go contesting on a big gun station like ES9C rather than do it on your station?

Kristjan: Since I have started with the ES7A station in 2018, I was determined to build something very effective and affordable. And so based on that determination, today the shack consists of a couple of multiband towers, also stacked monoband antennas. It was always meant to be as cheap as possible. Most of the antennas are home-made; even the towers are straightened and repainted old steel. And since this is now somewhat a decent station, for a Single-OP I don’t really see the point to go to ES9C, @ES5TV’s place anymore. I would rather see how I’m doing against his station (S: wow!). On the other hand, if there is a Multi-OP category in a contest, then it makes more sense to go.

S: With all that at ES7A, could you please describe your most recent NRAU-Baltic contest experience in 2026? How did the contest go for you and how was it impacted by the time change?

Kristjan: Well, since there were strong arguments from the Scandinavian side, that we need to change time, so that they would have better propagation, that didn’t actually work out. I can confirm that there was some aurora, but overall propagation just wasn’t there yet on that time window. I’m implying here to the rule to start 30 minutes before. Additionally, there was a belief that if we all started 30 minutes earlier, that would attract more Scandinavian stations and it didn’t really apply either. There were, I'd say, somewhat more Swedish stations than normal, but nothing major. Also overall QSO counts were down in the SSB leg. So I don’t know, perhaps make it a MIXED mode contest for 3 hours 😀

S: Do you think that given the dynamics of contesting in the Baltic-Nordic region, is the contesting decline caused in part by a lack of young operators?

Kristjan: I wouldn’t say it's because there are no young operators. There still are a few and this year Latvia 🇱🇻 gave us a good show. They had so many young operators on air, it was amazing. The main issue is that people just either are not particularly interested in (or even aware of) this fun and dynamic contest. Maybe also because the NRAU-Baltic contest is not represented enough anymore in the national contesting communities. For example, ES2MC came up with the idea that we should align our scoring system to the CQWPX contests to make it more relatable. Every result matters, young or old!

S: So good to hear that Latvia 🇱🇻 is also rocking the contesting stage?

Kristjan: I have partnered with Kristers YL3JA to represent Europe 1 in the World Radiosport Team Championship (WRTC) 2026. The background of this partnership is that I first met Kristers (who is a Latvian) a decade ago at a YOTA camp in Estonia. A few years later, we made a true contest pact at ES5TV during a multi-op event that eventually led us to the WRTC 2026 position. So in that sense, yes, Latvia is and will be rocking the stage too!

S. Thank you for the wonderful wrap-up! It seems that Lithuania has some homework to do!

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