It occurred to me that I hadn't posted in almost three weeks. Thinking about why, I realized that I'm in one of those cycles where I'm working more than usual, leaving less time for radio (and other "free time" activities). When I get home from work at 8PM, it's a little hard to find time to fit in radio along with all the usual things that go on around here, and while I have had the radio on, I haven't been making a lot of contacts.
Still, I have been doing a few things, and it's time to "get on the horse again" and post an update.
At the end of my last post, I was talking about the California QSO Party, and how I only had a limited time to work that event. I did work a few more stations, but wound up with only about 20 stations contacted in total. That's by far my lowest total ever, but I did send in my log anyway. Hopefully next year I'll have more time and the conditions will be better.
Last weekend I did spend some time participating in the JARTS RTTY contest. I made 173 contacts spread out over two days, which while not exactly championship level, was fun. I'm really starting to enjoy the RTTY contests more and more, and I think I'll makle an effort to look for more ot them.
Early last week, the kids called me at work during the afternoon with the news that my G5RV had come down, probably due to the high winds we were experiencing. Other than when I dropped it intentionally last year when having some tree work done, it's been up for around 7 years now, which is a fairly long time. I figured that the wires had broken, and I'd need to replace it. I had the kids take a picture of what had happened and send it to me, and it turned out to be not nearly as bad as I thought. All that had happened was that one of the support ropes (which is itself held to the tree with a bungee cord acting as a shock absorber) had somehow gotten disconnected. In fact, probably because that rope has been over a high branch for so long, the antenna itself barely dropped at all. When I got home that night, I found the ropes dangling from a branch, although by the next morning, the pull from the antenna had started to pull the rope up into the tree and was threatening to get out of reach. (There's more than enough rope to be within reach with the antenna on the ground, but it was coiled up and the coil was almost out of reach.) I was able to pull the coil of rope down and I tied the bungee, which was now hanging low enough to reach, to a chair to keep it in place until I had a chance to see what had happened and repair it.
(I just re-read that paragraph and I realized that I should explain that the support rope for the antenna goes up from the ground and over a fairly high branch in the tree. As a result, when the antenna goes down, the rope pulls up).
I'd taken Friday off to use up some of the vacation days that I have left over (my company has a pretty generous vacation policy, but if you don't use up your days, you lose them) so I took the opportunity to fix the support rope. I pulled the ladder out of the garage and climbed up to where the main coil of rope was hanging (in mid-air), and found that the 3 inch long eyebolt had somehow pulled out of the tree. The support rope and bungee were still tied to it, and I honestly can't figure out how it could have pulled out, but that's what happened. The fix, of course, was easy: I drilled a pilot hole in the tree at an appropriate height and simply screwed the eyebolt back into the tree. I tied off the line again, and I was back in business.
As proof that the antenna was still working just fine, I finally made a contact with the VK9DWX team on Willis Island, which I'd been trying to do for the past couple of weeks. Willis is a relatively rare location to work on radio, and I'd been coming downstairs before work to try to make a contact on 40m, which seemed like my best chance. Unfortunately, even though I could hear them fairly well, I just wasn't able to make a contact in the morning. Fortunately, yesterday afternoon I was able to make a single contact with them on 30m CW, so I was able to put Willis Island in my logbook as all-time DXCC entity #287.
The CQ WorldWide DX Contest is taking place this weekend. As I mentioned in my posting about that contest last year, this isn't really my favorite contest, and in fact, as I write this, the contest is probably around halfway over and I haven't made a single contact. I will likely get on the air in a little while, but I don't expect to make a lot of contacts. (Of course, I've said that before then gotten wound up in the contest. We'll see what happens this time.)
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Sunday, October 05, 2008
2008/9 Contesting Season Starting
It's that time of the year when contesters are kept busy and the Grumpy Old Men are grumpier: The start of the contest season. I'll get to the Grumpy Old Men part in a bit, but first the part of the contesters.
There are contests every weekend of the year, but the more well-known (or "bigger") contests start taking place around now and continue for the next few months. I imagine this has to do with worldwide propagation or something, but to tell the truth I've never really looked into why the "big contests" alll start right about now.
The good news is that for contesters, there's usually something "big" every weekend. Last weekend I participated (or "played around", as I like to say) in the CQ WorldWide RTTY DX contest. In this contest, any station can work any other station, so even if the band conditions aren't very good (in my opinion, they were awful Saturday, though they improved to merely lousy on Sunday) you can usually find lots of stations to work within your own country. Of course, the way scoring works you get more points for working stations outside of your own country, and even more for working stations outside of your own continent, so that's what you try to do, when you can.
The RTTY (pronounced "Ritty") in the name of the contest means that you can only use Radio TeleTYpe mode to make contacts. Originally, this mean that there was an actually mechanical teletype connected via some specialized equipment to a radio, but now, most RTTY enthusiasts use their computer sound card with a fairly simple connection to their radio, along with an encoding/decoding program on their computer, such as the very popular MMTTY. What's really nice about these digital mode contests is the amount of automation that can be done by your contest logging program. As I've mentioned before, I use N1MM's contest logger, which has some really terrific features for handling digital contests, even for casual contesters like me. For example, as with all contests, the exchange of information between stations is structured, with little or no change between contacts. (For this particular contest, nothing at all changes.) The N1MM program allows you to set up your exchange sequences such that once you've gotten the other stations callsign, the exchange process is almost entirely automated. The operator then needs to hunt for stations, adjust the radio to make sure that there's "clean copy" (meaning that you can read the information being sent), and then just do a few mouse clicks or keyboard presses (all configurable) to complete the contact.
One interesting thing about RTTY mode is that although you can hear the sound that the other station is sending, unlike CW (and certainly unlike any speech modes) it can't be decoded by ear. (Ok, I've heard that some really experienced guys actually can decode RTTY by ear. I sure know that I can't. Here's an audio sample, you can decide for yourself). The software used to help tune in the signal has a tuning aid to help you zero-in the signal, so you can use RTTY completely without any audio coming out of your speakers (or headphones) if you want to.
Anyway, I've played in RTTY contests before, and one big thing for me is that they are often a good place to pick up a new country, or a country that I've contacted before on a new band. My decision to participate in this contest was very last minute: I think I fired up the contesting software about 15 minutes after the start of the contest, spent a while configuring it, and then operated for a while on Friday night. I did some more operating Saturday afternoon, and again Sunday afternoon into early evening. I wound up on the air for around 12 hours or so, and made 257 contacts, with a score of just under 115,000 points. I was quite happy with my effort, which I think was decent for a low power station just "playing around".
One thing that I did was to set some "moving target" goals for myself to help keep going. Initially, I wanted to try to make at least 150 contacts, which seemed reasonable on Saturday afternoon. After I surpassed that, I decided that I wanted to break 100,000 points, and then, at the very end of the contest, I decided that I wanted to make at least 250 contacts. (Although I did succeed in that, I was getting a little frantic as I was about 3 contacts short of my goal with not long to go in the contest, and seemed unable to make any others. Fortunately, I managed to work a bunch of stations during the final minutes.) Setting these kinds of goals for me helps to make things fun. Unlike serious contesters, I "cheat" by setting my goals as I'm operating. I do this because I'm trying to keep things fun for myself. If I'd set out to make 250 contacts before I started Friday night, I probably would have gotten discouraged during the day on Saturday when things were going slowly and given up. So, I "cheat" and create goals that seem reasonable for the conditions and the amount of time I'm likely to have available. I'm not suggesting that this works well for anyone else, but it works for me.
This weekend is the California QSO Party contest, which is one of my favorite state QSO party contests. (As I've mentioned before, the goal of these contests is to make contact with as many stations within a particular state as possible, or for those within that state to make as many contacts in general.) Sharon and I had plans on Saturday (visiting a few wineries in the Hudson Valley in New York), so I only had a few hours to operate in the contest on Sunday. Unfortunately, the bands just weren't cooperating early Sunday afternoon, and after about an hour of operating, I'd only worked eight stations. Listening now (around 4PM EDT), things seemed to have picked up a bit, so maybe I'll try again in a while, but my initial attempts were not fun, so I stopped to work on some other things, including writing this.
So what about the Grumpy Old Men comment? It seems that as the contest season gets underway, the complaints start to flow into the mailing lists complaining about the contesters. Some of the complaints are legitimate, since unfortunately some of my contesting brethren do just plop themselves down on a frequency without ensuring that the frequency is not in use. That is just plain wrong, period. However, some of the complaints are made because "the contester was on the frequency that we use every day, and even though they were there first, they should move". Sorry, but that's not the way things work. We amateurs have a reasonable amount of radio spectrum to use. There's plenty of room for all of us if we cooperate with each other. We are fortunate to have these valuable resource to share. If we can't play nicely with each other, then the FCC might just decide to pick up our collective sandbox and give it to someone else.
There are contests every weekend of the year, but the more well-known (or "bigger") contests start taking place around now and continue for the next few months. I imagine this has to do with worldwide propagation or something, but to tell the truth I've never really looked into why the "big contests" alll start right about now.
The good news is that for contesters, there's usually something "big" every weekend. Last weekend I participated (or "played around", as I like to say) in the CQ WorldWide RTTY DX contest. In this contest, any station can work any other station, so even if the band conditions aren't very good (in my opinion, they were awful Saturday, though they improved to merely lousy on Sunday) you can usually find lots of stations to work within your own country. Of course, the way scoring works you get more points for working stations outside of your own country, and even more for working stations outside of your own continent, so that's what you try to do, when you can.
The RTTY (pronounced "Ritty") in the name of the contest means that you can only use Radio TeleTYpe mode to make contacts. Originally, this mean that there was an actually mechanical teletype connected via some specialized equipment to a radio, but now, most RTTY enthusiasts use their computer sound card with a fairly simple connection to their radio, along with an encoding/decoding program on their computer, such as the very popular MMTTY. What's really nice about these digital mode contests is the amount of automation that can be done by your contest logging program. As I've mentioned before, I use N1MM's contest logger, which has some really terrific features for handling digital contests, even for casual contesters like me. For example, as with all contests, the exchange of information between stations is structured, with little or no change between contacts. (For this particular contest, nothing at all changes.) The N1MM program allows you to set up your exchange sequences such that once you've gotten the other stations callsign, the exchange process is almost entirely automated. The operator then needs to hunt for stations, adjust the radio to make sure that there's "clean copy" (meaning that you can read the information being sent), and then just do a few mouse clicks or keyboard presses (all configurable) to complete the contact.
One interesting thing about RTTY mode is that although you can hear the sound that the other station is sending, unlike CW (and certainly unlike any speech modes) it can't be decoded by ear. (Ok, I've heard that some really experienced guys actually can decode RTTY by ear. I sure know that I can't. Here's an audio sample, you can decide for yourself). The software used to help tune in the signal has a tuning aid to help you zero-in the signal, so you can use RTTY completely without any audio coming out of your speakers (or headphones) if you want to.
Anyway, I've played in RTTY contests before, and one big thing for me is that they are often a good place to pick up a new country, or a country that I've contacted before on a new band. My decision to participate in this contest was very last minute: I think I fired up the contesting software about 15 minutes after the start of the contest, spent a while configuring it, and then operated for a while on Friday night. I did some more operating Saturday afternoon, and again Sunday afternoon into early evening. I wound up on the air for around 12 hours or so, and made 257 contacts, with a score of just under 115,000 points. I was quite happy with my effort, which I think was decent for a low power station just "playing around".
One thing that I did was to set some "moving target" goals for myself to help keep going. Initially, I wanted to try to make at least 150 contacts, which seemed reasonable on Saturday afternoon. After I surpassed that, I decided that I wanted to break 100,000 points, and then, at the very end of the contest, I decided that I wanted to make at least 250 contacts. (Although I did succeed in that, I was getting a little frantic as I was about 3 contacts short of my goal with not long to go in the contest, and seemed unable to make any others. Fortunately, I managed to work a bunch of stations during the final minutes.) Setting these kinds of goals for me helps to make things fun. Unlike serious contesters, I "cheat" by setting my goals as I'm operating. I do this because I'm trying to keep things fun for myself. If I'd set out to make 250 contacts before I started Friday night, I probably would have gotten discouraged during the day on Saturday when things were going slowly and given up. So, I "cheat" and create goals that seem reasonable for the conditions and the amount of time I'm likely to have available. I'm not suggesting that this works well for anyone else, but it works for me.
This weekend is the California QSO Party contest, which is one of my favorite state QSO party contests. (As I've mentioned before, the goal of these contests is to make contact with as many stations within a particular state as possible, or for those within that state to make as many contacts in general.) Sharon and I had plans on Saturday (visiting a few wineries in the Hudson Valley in New York), so I only had a few hours to operate in the contest on Sunday. Unfortunately, the bands just weren't cooperating early Sunday afternoon, and after about an hour of operating, I'd only worked eight stations. Listening now (around 4PM EDT), things seemed to have picked up a bit, so maybe I'll try again in a while, but my initial attempts were not fun, so I stopped to work on some other things, including writing this.
So what about the Grumpy Old Men comment? It seems that as the contest season gets underway, the complaints start to flow into the mailing lists complaining about the contesters. Some of the complaints are legitimate, since unfortunately some of my contesting brethren do just plop themselves down on a frequency without ensuring that the frequency is not in use. That is just plain wrong, period. However, some of the complaints are made because "the contester was on the frequency that we use every day, and even though they were there first, they should move". Sorry, but that's not the way things work. We amateurs have a reasonable amount of radio spectrum to use. There's plenty of room for all of us if we cooperate with each other. We are fortunate to have these valuable resource to share. If we can't play nicely with each other, then the FCC might just decide to pick up our collective sandbox and give it to someone else.
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