ARRL DX contest

There is still a few hours of the ARRL DX CW contest to go but I have worked all that I want to work this weekend. I only took part for fun, so no targets to beat. I did hope to work some of the rarer west coast states but conditions didn't allow it. I only worked W/VE stations - in fact I only worked US stations, the VEs were conspicuous by their absence. I did hear one VE but I never managed to work him. So in comparison to other contests my haul of contacts was worse than normal.

I operated for a couple of hours late Saturday morning, and the same again after lunch. On Sunday morning I did another couple of hours but I almost gave up as I seemed to be hearing all the same stations I worked on Saturday. Then the jinx left and I managed to log another batch of new stations. But by Sunday afternoon I'd had enough, and it was a fine late winter day so I went for a walk by the river with Olga.

I think conditions this weekend were below average. Ten metres was all but dead; 15m was quite productive but the money band as usual was 20m. I didn't try the lower bands as I think my attic antennas are too much of a compromise on those bands to work DX with them.

My total of 55 stations worked is nothing to write home about, but remember I was only working US stations - I ignored all the Europeans and Russians whom I would have worked in a normal contest. I worked 20 different states: CT, FL, GA, IL, MA, MD, MN, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, VA, VT and WI. So my 100W was barely making it past the east coast. If anyone is interested in my full log the contest starts on this page.

Working in a contest is always fun. It's not the winning, it's the taking part that counts!

ARRL DX Contest questions

I see that the ARRL DX CW contest is next weekend. I haven't decided yet whether I will come on and give away a few points, nor whether I will operate QRP or run 100 watts. I think it will depend on propagation.

One thing I am unsure about is what exchange to send. I believe DX stations - which means me in this context - are supposed to send RST and power.

If I'm running QRP (5 watts) do I send "5NN 5" or "5NN 005" or even "5NN TT5"?

If I'm running 100 watts would I send "5NN 100" or "5NN 1TT" or even "5NN ATT"? These short form numbers confuse me a bit. I've heard 1 being sent as A, and 0 (zero) being sent as the letter "O". Or at least, I think I have.

If I change the power as I normally do and run 100W only when it is needed do I send the actual power I am using or stick to the same exchange (100W) throughout the contest?

Do I work only US stations or will all stations, even Europeans, benefit from working me with a point?

A brief spell of activity in the PACC contest

Sunday morning I was a bit late getting up. I felt like a change from listening to silence while waiting for someone to come up in DV mode so I decided to try some QRP CW using the KX3 to remove the temptation to turn the power up.

It was clear there was a contest on - the PACC contest - and I worked out that the PA stations were sending a city or county code and the rest were sending a serial number, so I decided to give away a few points.

I set the KX3 to 5 watts to keep in the spirit of QRP and started making some contacts. I thought 40m would be the best band to work Dutch stations from here. In 20 minutes I made 4 QSOs. All came back to my first call, and I was reminded that it really isn't that difficult to make contacts on the 40m band with an attic antenna and low power.

I reached the bottom of the band and started tuning up the other way but the band seemed to have gone quiet. After a few minutes a light bulb flickered on dimly in my head and I looked at the clock: 1205. I dashed downstairs to get the February RadCom and looked in the contest news. Sure enough, the PACC contest ran from 1200 Saturday to 1200 Sunday. It had finished five minutes ago!

2013/02/10	11:39	7.021	CW	PA5TT	599	001	599	ZL
2013/02/10	11:42	7.019	CW	PA6NB	599	002	599	NB
2013/02/10	11:45	7.018	CW	PA3BWK	599	003	599	UT
2013/02/10	11:55	7.011	CW	PA0AA	599	004	599	UT

I really should get up earlier on Sundays!

25 November 2012

The last day of the CQ WW DX CW contest. But nothing of interest to report. Sunday morning was one of those mornings when I didn't seem to fully wake up. It was after 11am before I got into the shack.

My intention was to make some more contest contacts on 10m. Although I don't compete seriously, I usually decide what category I am going to play in - single or multi-band, QRP or Low Power - and stick to it so that if I do make a decent number of contacts I can send an entry in. But this time my effort didn't even justify sending in a check log.

I heard some interesting big gun stations such as in Africa (Gambia, Senegal) but I just could not be heard over the others calling. One Russian station seemed to be following me around and he wasn't having much luck either. It was hard going even with the more run of the mill stations. I felt like I was running QRP. In fact, I've had better results when I did run QRP (such as for the CQ WW WPX back in May, when I used the KX3 ) than I was having this weekend.

It was obviously a mistake to limit myself to 10 metres. Not everyone was having such bad luck as me though. I heard a DX station who wasn't hearing my calls working fellow blogger Tim G4VXE. So much for the magic dipole!

After I broke off for lunch I couldn't be bothered to get back on the air again and so I spent the afternoon listening to a broadcast concert. I will draw a veil over my lamentable effort. (Those who are really interested to see the extent of my embarrassment can take a look at my contact log.)

10m 24 November 2012

The first day of the CQ WW DX CW contest and propagation on 10m is disappointingly down compared to previous days.

10m WSPR spots @ G4ILO 24 November 2012

No propagation to USA as you can see.

I have made a handful of contest contacts on 10m but I have been too preoccupied with computer issues to really get into it. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.

CQ WW SSB 2012

I'm not a serious contester - how could I be with attic antennas? - but when I'm in the right mood I do find contests fun. And the CQ Magazine contests are, in my opinion, the best of all. Even though I'll never submit a log that appears more than a few lines up from the bottom of its category, I still get a buzz from that feeling of taking part in a big event. For those making a serious effort it is a big event, and I know that they do appreciate the points they get from working little popgun stations like mine. The big contests are important events in the ham radio calendar, and those who don't wish to participate can always use the WARC bands or a different mode for those few days a year that a big event is on.

Last year I didn't even feel like switching on the radio for the contest, so this year's effort marked a bit of a personal milestone. As I am only taking part for fun (though why else would anyone participate?) I thought at first that I would use the KX3 and make a QRP entry. But I soon changed my mind the afternoon before the contest when I tried to call some of the contestants who were checking out their stations and not one of them even acknowledged my calls. I decided that this contest is not the place for QRP, so I used my K3 with its 100W PA instead. Despite this there were still a few stations who didn't seem to hear me call. I guess they were not using Elecraft receivers!

I take my hat off to those who do submit QRP entries, particularly those who in the spirit of QRP use simple wire antennas. Roger G3XBM deserves a special mention as from the look of it he did as well with 5W from his FT-817 and halo antenna as I did with 100W and a dipole.

I set myself a target of 100 contacts and thought I would start off on 10m and see how it goes. In the event I made 128 contacts and there was so much activity on Ten that there was no need to try any other band. I amassed (if that's the right word) 203 contact points and 53 multipliers for a submitted score of 10759. Time spent was the main limiting factor: I spent a few hours on Saturday and slightly less on the Sunday, and didn't operate during the evenings at all. I could have submitted a check log but by sending in a normal log I will have the added interest of seeing how far from the bottom of the category I have come!

During the contest I took time out now and again to make tweaks to my logging program KComm. I actually found a bug that has still got me scratching my head. If you enter the contest exchange (CQ Zone in this case) as a single digit (such as "5") the value is not written to the log file. I worked around it by remembering to use two digits (e.g. "05"). Hopefully I can fix this before the CQ WW CW contest.

There is not much worth noting in my log. South America and Australia are notable for their complete absence, though I did hear a couple of Brazilian stations. Gotaways were Vietnam and Thailand. They would have been all-time new countries for me, but I just couldn't crack the pileups. New countries I did get were Ceuta & Melilla, Greenland, Tajikistan and Kosovo, which set me scurrying off to get a new wf1b.dat that included this new entity.

China I have worked before, but I missed a second Chinese station in a different zone because I just could not make out his call. I think some operators don't realize that if they spoke a bit more slowly and used a bit less compression (okay, a lot less compression) they would make just as many contacts and would have their call entered correctly in a lot more logs. One station told me "we have worked before" as a result of a logging error by me because the first time I mis-heard his call.

All in all it was a fun weekend. Now back to WSPR!

CQ WW WPX CW 2012

Last weekend was the weekend of the CW version of the CQ WW WPX contest. I am not a serious competitor as it isn't really practical with attic antennas but I like to come on for the big contests to give away a few points and see what I can work. (Perhaps they should create a special category for stations with indoor antennas. :) )

I only managed about an hour on Saturday and a couple of hours on Sunday as I easily get tired out. But I thought it would be an opportunity to put the KX3 through its paces. Although I don't plan on sending in any more than a check log, when operating QRP I like to adhere to QRP power levels, so I limited the KX3's output to 5 watts.

Other bloggers have written that conditions were good for the contest, but I thought they were poorer than in previous years. True, there was some activity on 10m this year. But on 20m it seemed I spent more time searching and less time pouncing than on previous occasions. And I didn't hear any US stations at all. Perhaps I was just operating at the wrong time.

The KX3 performed superbly hooked up to KComm, my simple logging program for Elecraft transceivers. I logged 30 QSOs with 29 prefixes and 13 countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine. My short term memory is abominable - I forget a serial number the moment I stop to send my serial number to the other station, so I really appreciated KComm's ability to read the text output by the KX3's built-in Morse decoder and print it up on the screen.

So that was the CQ WW WPX CW 2012 for me. Hopefully next year I'll be able to make a more respectable show.

Have fun on digimodes and win an antenna analyzer

The Annual Digifest will be held on the first full weekend of June (2012 dates are June 2nd and 3rd ). This will be Digifest’s 5th year. Its popularity is growing with more than 200 logs received last year.

A peculiarity of this Contest is the great variety of different categories of participants in five digital modes: RTTY 75, BPSK 63, MFSK 16, HELLSCHREIBERand OLIVIA. The points calculation is based on the distance between the stations.

The contest consists of 3 convenient periods (8 hours each) during the weekend. To add more excitement those who like competing in real time will be able to see their results on a server.

There are lots of nice prizes, mostly RigExpert AA-230 and AA-30 Antenna Analyzers and RigExpert USB Interfaces. All prizes sponsored by RigExpert Ukraine Ltd.

As the number of the participants is relatively small and the most populated competing area is Europe, stations from NA, SA, Africa, Asia and Australia are at a great advantage. Last year those stations were the most prize winners. To support growing participation from Europe the sponsors have doubled the prizes so separate main prizes are now offered both for Europe and the rest of the world.

For those won’t be able to win a main prize there will be a lot of small gifts like T-shirts and paper awards. All the prizes will be mailed to participants' home addresses. The results are usually available just 2 weeks after the end of the Contest, So, lets meet on the first weekend of June and have fun!

Complete rules can be found at http://www.mixw.net/misc/DigiFest/index.html and http://www.rigexpert.com/index?s=main&f=digifest

No contest

At the weekend I noticed that the CQ WW WPX phone contest was on. I'm not a fan of phone contests - hollering your call into a mic over and over again is not my idea of fun - but I thought it might be interesting to see what I could hear or work on 10m when so many stations were on.

In the end I only made a handful of contacts. It was just too manic for my current state of mind. I couldn't remember the serial numbers I was given before typing them into the log, so I would have to wait for the station I worked to make another contact and see what the next serial number was. I much prefer CW contests using a code reader to print up the exchange so that I can just double-click the information to enter it error-free in the log.

I've just started my final cycle of chemotherapy and it has knocked me back a bit. So I think I'll stick to pastimes like WSPR and JT65 that have a more relaxed pace until I'm feeling better.

Taking part

On Saturday I blew the dust (literally!) off my K3's microphone. After I had finished sneezing, I started making some contacts in the CQ WorldWide SSB DX Contest.

This was not intended to be a serious competitive effort. My intention was to spend all of the time I could spare that weekend making contest contacts and see how many stations I could work. I spent about an hour on Saturday morning before going with Olga to the garden centre, and a couple of hours in the afternoon. On Sunday I was up earlier than normal because the clocks went back overnight, so I operated for about three hours in the morning before lunch. I had intended to do some operating in the afternoon as well but the three hours in the morning had left me feeling a bit tired and stiff so I went for a walk after lunch and then fell asleep on my return home. Getting old is my excuse!

I made a total of 154 contacts in 43 different countries and 4 continents during my six hours or so of operating. The detailed breakdown, for those interested, is shown in the screen grab of the contest statistics dialog from KComm (the Extra field shows the number of CQ zones.) This would give me a claimed score of 17,487 points if my calculations are correct, which by comparison with last year's results would place me well down the second half of the All Band Single Operator Low Power Unassisted results table.

This was the first time I had made such an effort for an SSB contest. Until now I hated turning on the radio during big SSB contests because the bands sounded like bedlam. But I had never tried with the K3 before. Instead of a mush of intermod, splatter and AGC pumping I could hear everything clearly. Sometimes I could hear two or three stations on the same frequency simultaneously, one in the foreground and a couple in the background. And the superb DSP filtering made it easy to shut out close-by stations so I could copy a weaker one. I often had the passband down to 1.8kHz and copy was still crystal clear.

Initially I started off just working the loud ones because I didn't want to waste the serious contesters' time by making them struggle to hear my call. But I found there was no hard and fast rule relating how strong a station was with whether they heard me. One Finnish station, 10dB over 9 with me, just kept on calling as if I wasn't there. But many weaker ones came right back to my first call.

Frustratingly, a significant number of stations came back to me as "Golf 4 Lima India Oscar" - exactly the same error that was made when I ordered my QRSS beacon kit a couple of weeks ago. What is it about my call? This doesn't happen on CW (though I used to get replied to as G3ILO very often as the holder of that call is a well known QRP CW operator.)

Conditions didn't appear to be very good this weekend. I'd hoped to hear some interesting DX on 10m but I heard hardly anyone at all on the band. As always, 20m was the liveliest band, but I made almost as many contacts on 15m, probably because the QRM was less making it easier to make contacts.

I didn't work any DX and I only worked one all time new DXCC entity - Svalbard, JW5E. I did hear a VK on 15m on Sunday morning but he had a big pileup going and after trying for about five minutes I decided not to waste any more time and move on.

Despite my unspectacular results I thoroughly enjoyed my few hours in the CQ WW DX SSB contest. No doubt QRZ.com and other online forums will be full of grumbles about contests taking over the band for the entire weekend, the only time working people can get on the air etc etc. But if you can't beat them, why not join them?

My feeling is that contesting is one of the many different activities you can pursue and to get the most from the hobby you should try as many of those different activities as you can. As this post has hopefully shown, having indoor antennas is no obstacle to working a decent number of stations and earning a respectable score for the time spent. It's not the winning, it's the taking part that counts. I certainly felt like a real participant in this radiosport event and I look forward to seeing my call in the results table next year.

Undecodable mode alert

If you're operating the PSK digimode on the weekend of 18th-19th September and suddenly find your screen full of PSK63 signals that you can't decode, don't be worried that there is something wrong with your radio or your computer. You are hearing the 7th CIS DX QPSK63 Contest 2010. Yes, it's QPSK63, that mode you've seen on your menu and never been able to get a reply to when you tried it. If you were ever frustrated by this, now's your chance to get satisfaction!

Starting at 1200UTC on the Saturday and continuing until 1200UTC the following day, the object is to make as many contacts as possible using QPSK63 (and only QPSK63) between stations in the Commonwealth of Independent States (known to many of us as the Former Soviet Union) and stations who are somewhere else. For more information see the contest website.

If you prefer SSB to digimodes, look for the upcoming 1st DX Esperanto Contest. It's a contest for phone operators, where all the contacts must be made using Esperanto.

It's all down to your ears

There was a lot of excitement on the Elecraft email reflector over the fact that the majority of participants in the World Radio Team Championship 2010 (WRTC 2010) were using Elecraft K3s. There was even more glee when it was discovered that Scott Robbins W4PA, former Ten-Tec product manager, and Tim Duffy K3LR of Team Icom had taken K3s. This was like the President of Coca Cola serving Pepsi at his anniversary party!

There have not been many comments now the results are out, which show that the top two teams, from Russia and Estonia respectively, were using FT-1000MPs. The USA team of N6MJ and KL9A in third place used K3s, as did K5ZD and W2SC who came fifth, but the fourth placed S50A and S57AW again used FT-1000MPs as did the Lithuanian entry in seventh place.

So let's get this straight: the winning stations and several others in the top ten used a now obsolete radio that was introduced in 1996 which has frequently been criticized as inferior to the K3? I suspect the fact that many international competitors took K3s may have more to do with the fact that the Elecraft radio is small enough and light enough to be taken on an aircraft as hand baggage. And I suspect that the reason for the success of the stations using FT-1000MPs is that there is more to winning a contest than having a receiver with the best performance numbers.

Anyone want to swap an Elecraft K3 for an FT-1000MP? (Only joking.)

VHF NFD washout

Conditions could hardly have been worse for the RSGB's VHF Field Day contest this weekend. Yesterday I worked a few southern Scottish portables on 2m and 6m, plus the Lincoln Radio Club station G5FZ/P on 2m, and that was that. There did not appear to be a shred of Sporadic-E on either 2m or 6m, according to DX Sherlock. 6m was so quiet my K3 S-meter wasn't even moving.

Today when I turned on the radio I tuned both 2m and 6m without hearing a single signal. The map on the right probably shows why. We awoke to heavy rain and gale force winds, and I immediately thought of those poor guys on hilltop sites with their guyed poles supporting their beam antennas. If the wind didn't force them to take the antennas down I dare say the rain and the poor propagation made them decide they might just as well give up.

This has been a really disappointing year for me too, VHF-wise. After working Spain and Portugal on 2m on two separate occasions last year - the last being exactly one year ago - I improved my antenna by 3dB and my output power by 6dB in the hope of doing better during this year's season. But I have worked nothing and as far as I know the sporadic-E this year has hardly been heard this far north. DX Sherlock showed that a couple of well-sited northerly stations managed to make a few contacts a few weeks ago and I fleetingly heard a station from Romania complete a contact and call CQ at that time, but that was that.

Something is becoming clear to me that I never realized when I lived in the south, which is that just a couple of degrees of latitude can make a huge difference to the amount of Sporadic-E you get. The season isn't over now but it must be on the wane and I'm soon going to be away from the radio for a couple of weeks, so it's looking as if 2010 is going to pass for me without any 2m Sporadic-E DX.

Back to front

Last night for the first time in a very long time I operated RTTY. I made ten contacts in the BARTG RTTY 75 contest. The reason was that Elecraft had released a beta version of firmware for the K3 that enhances the built-in DSP modems to support the 75baud RTTY mode that was being used in the contest. Now that the K3 also supports a way to get decoded text into a computer program I thought it would be fun to give it a try.

For those unfamiliar with the K3, the transceiver boasts a built-in Morse decoder plus DSP based modems (encoders and decoders) for PSK31, standard 45.5baud RTTY and now 75baud RTTY. As the K3 doesn't allow direct input from a keyboard, the usual way to use this facility is to send text using a Morse paddle and read received text on a scrolling 7-character window of the K3 display. However, using a program like KComm it is possible to send and receive text using software commands over the CAT interface as well. Since, like most things that require good motor skills, I'm hopeless with a paddle (or key) at anything much above 12wpm, that's what I did.

I installed the new firmware and it decoded 75baud RTTY signals perfectly, so I waited for the contest to begin. After it did, I soon found that although people were hearing me they weren't decoding me. I got lots of QRZ?, ??????? and SRI NO PRINT. I started to get frustrated and began thinking that RTTY is an obsolete mode that has no place in the 21st century because I know I could have made contact with these stations easily using PSK31 and a fraction of the power.

I decided to switch to soundcard mode and use Fldigi to try to make some contest contacts, and then found that people were replying to me on the first call! So clearly there was something wrong with the RTTY being generated by my K3.

This morning I tried receiving some of my transmitted RTTY using the FT-817 and Fldigi on my NC-10 netbook. When the RTTY was generated by Fldigi it was received perfectly. However when it was generated by the K3 I received gibberish unless I switched the K3 to REV DATA mode (i.e. reverse sideband.) Since I was receiving the RTTY perfectly OK using the normal sideband I presume that the K3's transmitted RTTY was reversed. I have reported it to Wayne and await comments.

Unfortunately I did have some problems with KComm as well. After a while, it started aborting the transmission of any macro after the first few diddles. Like many programs, it has grown to the point where it is hard to understand what is going on any more and my interest in programming has fallen off a cliff in the last few months. I don't know if I will ever get around to fixing the problems and releasing the final version. I do like using it, and KComm is the only program that really supports the K2 and K3 properly because it doesn't treat them like a Kenwood TS2000 (whose command set it nominally shares) but was written to take account of the way these radios actually work.

Daft contest exchanges

I just got round to checking the Sport Radio page of the May RadCom so as to transfer to my wall calendar the dates and details of any contests I might be interested in making some contacts in this month. I happened to notice that the exchange for the 144MHz Contest on 15/16 May is RS(T), serial number, grid locator and post code.

Post Code??? What's the point of that? And what if you are operating portable from a hill somewhere and don't have a post code? Daft idea if ever I saw one.

Weekend ups and downs

Many people have blogged about their activities over the weekend during the ARRL DX CW contest. I had planned to spend some time making some Stateside contacts, to see how many different states I could work and perhaps make enough contacts to be worth submitting an entry, even though I had no intention to win anything. Alas it was not to be. After just over an hour on Saturday afternoon, during which I had made 17 contacts on 15m, Olga learned that her sister in Ukraine was in intensive care in hospital. It would have been inappropriate to carry on making contacts on the radio, even if I had still felt like it after receiving that news. So that was the end of my participation in the ARRL contest.

Olga felt she would have to go urgently to Ukraine to see her sister, which made me depressed and anxious. Kharkov isn't the easiest place to get to from here, even without snow both here and there making the journey more difficult. However on Sunday Olga received some better news about her sister, including the advice that there was little she could do if she went now and it would be better to wait until she was out of hospital before visiting. I'm still depressed at the thought of being without my wife and soulmate for a bit, but at least I will have more time to get used to the idea before it happens.

My interest in the contest didn't recover after this, but I did read about a couple of new pieces of digital radio software which I tried out and wrote about yesterday. Both of these programs are very interesting, and I think I shall have more to say about them in the near future.

Car Parks On The Air

As the instigator of the Wainwrights On The Air scheme I hope this does not come across as a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I think the mania for "Things On The Air" is getting a bit out of hand.

Courtesy of Dan KB6NU's Blog I have just learned about Railroad Depots on the Air, a group whose aim is to set up radio stations at railroad depots and so that people can collect points by making contacts with them. Where will it all end? I suppose the road transport enthusiasts will set up a competing activity Bus Stations On The Air, if they haven't already.

I wonder if the people who dreamed up Islands On The Air knew what they were starting? Islands tend to be a long way away and expensive to get to, so Richard G3CWI came up with Summits On The Air (SOTA) which offered activators a large number of entities to activate without having to leave the country. Wainwrights On The Air is really just a local, junior SOTA. But both of those schemes have the disadvantage for the average ham unfit from too many hours slouched in front of the radio that you need to hike to the top of the mountain with your gear before you can activate it. So some awards for working easier to reach entities might be welcome.

Pubs On The Air would be extremely popular, especially with me. Certainly the lounge bar of the Bitter End in Cockermouth would make a more pleasant operating location than the top of Helvellyn in a hailstorm. But activators would be wise to get all the CW contacts over and done with at the start of the activation, with PSK31 reserved for just before closing time.

You could also have some programmes of a more topical nature. In Recession Victims On The Air you could earn points from contacting stations operating from closed-down Woolworths and MFI stores.

Car Parks On The Air would be the one for real couch-potato activators. All you would need to do is drive there, park up, turn on the mobile rig and start making contacts. You could even ask people wanting a paper QSL to make a donation to cover the cost of your Pay and Display ticket.

I'm sure you can think of plenty of others...

OK OM

The OK/OM DX CW Contest has just finished. I made three contacts on 80m last night in half an hour between TV programmes, and a further 55 on 20m and 40m after breakfast this morning for a total of 2494 claimed points.

I have a particular affinity for this contest for no other reason than the Czech Republic is one of my favourite countries. As always for me with contests this was a "just for fun" entry working down each band and trying to contact each OK or OM station I found. I'm not going to win any awards but I won't be quite as close to the bottom of my category as last time.

KComm performed well, keying the K3 using the serial command protocol - the only logging program that is specifically designed to do this. It's not a dedicated contest logger but it is fine for this kind of operation. It warned me before I could make a duplicate contact, its generic statistics capability gave me the counts of contacts and multipliers so I could easily calculate my claimed score and it allowed me to export my log in the requested Cabrillo format.

Well that's enough radio for one weekend. After posting this I'm going to stay out of the shack for a bit.