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JARTS WW RTTY 2013 scoreThis weekend I was all prepared for the JARTS WW RTTY contest. Propagation is great at the moment, around 9 am 10 meters is wide open. Saturday morning around 5:30 I was in the shack making QSO’s. Balancing between family time and contesting the whole weekend, Sunday evening at 10 o-clock I was done with it. With 303 QSO’s in the log the contest was done for me. Finally I’ve worked a great deal of Japanese stations (even on 15 meters were my FD-3 isn’t resonant) and some other new DXCC’s like Hong Kong, United Arabic Emirates and a few I didn’t have yet.
My set-up works great on 20, 15 and 10 meters. On 40 meters I must power down to around 20 watts to not have too much RFI in the shack. My homemade FSK-cable is not working at higher power levels and my keyboard is going nuts causing N1MM doing all kind of crazy things.
I think the shack is a little too close under the antenna. The fact that I don’t have a earthed wall outlet in my shack don’t help either I guess.

I’ve got to find out how to fix this before the next contest (coming weekend, CQ WW SSB). Nice quest for this week!

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Today I participated in the Makrothen RTTY 2013 contest. I didn’t want to sit upstairs for several hours, so I walked the transceiver and all other stuff downstairs and enter the contest from the dinning table in the living room.
My initial plan was to enter the contest for a hour or so and make 30 or 40 QSO’s. But propagation was quite good and my brand new FD-3 wire antenna on it’s new mast performed very well! Even on 10 meters I contacted one American after another. Got two new DXCC: Guantanamo Bay and Republic of the Congo! After about six hours I made 100 QSO’s.

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Today is the day! The chimney repair guy is dropping by today to do his magic. The jointing of our chimney is so bad, it just falls out by itself. So it’s not a good idea to put any antenna’s to it in this state.
He thought it would take a day to replace the jointing, so hopefully he’ll be able to finish the job by the end of the day.
I did pick up my new prepared glass fiber pole yesterday at Fred’s, PA3YH. Also attached my brand new Fritzel 1:6 1KW balun to it for the FD-3 wire antenna. On top there will be my Diamond X200N dual bander for 2m/70cm.
Hopefully next weekend the weather is good enough to put up the new mast to the chimney!