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This weekend I ran the BARTG Sprint RTTY contest (my favorite mode). Wonderfull thing to don’t have complains from the neighbors. Stayed up Saturday until 0:30 AM at 268 Q’s. Then again up at Sunday morning and in the radio room around 6:30 AM. Worked a few nice ones like JA, VK and PY. The contest ended on 12:00 UTC and at 11:00 UTC I was at my goal of 350 Q’s. The last hour I ran CQ on 20m. Nice sprint but unfortunately no 400 Q’s. I think I did quite OK, 46 DXCC’s.

I did noticed this contest I got quite good signals from the East and the West. Countries like Bulgaria, Hungaria etc. are easy to work (often with the first call). Also the United States and Canada are good doable. Scandinavian and Africa are much harder to reach. You might think it’s logical because my ZS6BKW is positioned West-East. But I wouldn’t suspect it has such an impact.

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This weekend I entered the Hungarian DX contest. A fun contest, 160 – 10 m in SSB and CW. Nice way to test my new antenna position (although not really different from the old one). There where noticeably less stations active with voice then in CW. My target was a minimum of 100 Q’s voice and 100 Q’s CW. Turned out I wasn’t even able to work 100 Q’s voice (98). CW Q’s could have been a lot more if I had stayed in that mode. More and more I dislike the voice mode for contesting. It’s loud, very wide signals, hard to copy and even harder to get copied (with some stations). Every now and the I switched back to CW and it’s just a warm bath. Every station I hear, I’m able to work. Almost every time on first try. For the division league I need to be active in voice as well, but I’m seriously considering to go CW and RTTY only for contesting.
10 meter was kind of open, but a little disappointing in score. 160 meters is just a steady S7/S8 QRM and I can only copy the strongest signals. My 2x 13,75 meter antenna as a bit small for good efficiency on this band; good noticeable in my score. But, I worked all bands! And that’s a good thing.

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X6000 on it's own chimney (left)Okay, so I moved my antenna to the other chimney of the house. Six meters away from the neighbors monitor (a Philips 190WV7CS/00) and after a thorough test on all HF-bands with 100 watt RTTY there is a little improvement. The striping has faded a little but not enough to satisfy the neighbor. So plan B came in action: temporarily replace the Philips piece of *&^(#@ with my 20′ Apple Cinema Display. As expected that solved the whole problem. No RFI whatsoever. So for now I’ll leave the monitor at his place so he can work. He’ll replace his Philips montor at a later time.

Let get on contesting!