Last weekend I entered the ARRL 10m CW/SSB contest. My 10m vertical (Antron A99) was still up on the roof since the last 10m contest. I did climb up the roof the reinstall the Buddipole. Not so successful this time due to a firm wind which blew it down again and again. Despite the support ropes.
The band starts opening up around 8:00 – 8:30 am. I switched back and forward between CW and USB. Actually the vertical was quite successful this time.
Around 7:00 pm the band was pretty much closed. Sunday I could only work until around 2:00 pm due to family duties.
After all a good contest, interesting to do a combined CW/SSB-contest. I think I need a good strategy for these combined contests next time. There were probably more Q’s to make then I did now.
Considering this the last contest for this years division league, I’ll take a rest now. I’ll rearrange the shack, clean out the place etc. Get everything up and running for the new contest year of 2014!
Category: Antenna’s
ARRL RTTY 10 Meter contest
This weekend there where multiple contests to choose from. To optimize my score I picked out the Melee Tara RTTY contest on Saturday and the ARRL RTTY 10 Meter contest on Sunday.
I started off with a well prepped N1MM. Loaded with call history file and a fresh master.dta and country file. FSK was working (plenty of practice on Saturday). But since 10 meters doesn’t open up until sunrise I did have breakfast with the family first. Then I climb up the roof to put some extra’s on for 10 meter. My Fritzel FD-3 can do 10 meter of course, but it’s not ideal. I put up my Buddipole and trimmed it for 10 meter. I found an old Solarcon Antron 99A vertical in the shed which (if I remember correctly) can be used for 10 meter too. Everything is functioning and a cup of hot coffee I went in the shack.
The Buddipole did a great job in the early morning hours! In the afternoon the vertical seemed to work better then the dipole. Q’s where running low, but that’s only logical for a single 10 meter band contest. I did manage to squeeze out 100 Q’s.
It was already dark when I put down the Buddipole. The vertical I left up for now. Maybe it’s handy for coming contests?
Melee Tara RTTY contest
Last Saturday I entered the Melee Tara RTTY contest. I woke up early at 5:30 AM and eat breakfast in the shack. I did want to make a flying start and score some early Q’s.
But unfortunately I did not prepare so N1MM was in CW modus since the last contest.
I didn’t get FSK operational for at least half a hour when finally found the option: [Enable both Hardware & Software PTT]. That did the trick. Full throttle at 40m, but there were only about 4 stations to work…. Well, let’s call CQ then. Also no luck. After 1,5 hour I had 6 Q’s in the log. OK, Tara RTTY isn’t a CQ World Wide of course. I have to remember that. Propagation was just fine and I hopped from 40 to 20 to 15 and even made 5 Q’s on 10 meters. But at the end of the afternoon, when I wanted to get back to 40 meter, I got a phone call of one of my neighbors. He complained about “stripes” on his TFT-monitor and wanted to know if it was my “hobby” causing this interference. I went over to his place and put some ferrite clamps around the cables. Unfortunately his TFT is just a few meters away from my FD-3 wire. So no matter what I did (turning the output power low, click on 12 ferrite clamps etc) the stripes are there to stay.
Since he had a deadline to work to I decided to wait that evening until he quits his computer work. But when he did quit around 9:30 PM, 40 meter was almost empty again. So no decent score. Anyway, had fun working in RTTY again!