Posted on
by

This weekend I entered the Work All European RTTY contest 2013. Saturday morning I was up early (5:30 am) to first switch on the radio. Of course the first band to enter this early is 40 meter. Unfortunately my set-up isn’t complete RFI-free on 40 meter. So when putting too much power out (around 60/65 watts) my keyboard is doing nasty stuff like put my computer in standby-modus or messing up N1MM. That’s a real pain because sometimes 60 watts is just a little short on power when a station hears you but keeps calling: “YOUR CALLSIGN? YOUR CALLSIGN??”. You know he will copy you when you’re able to power up to 100 watts.
But around the time the sun arise, I switched to 20 meter and on 20, 15 and 10 meter I can operate at full power.
I noticed quit quickly some “QTC-traffic”. Really no idea what it was (great preparation ;-)). I noticed the QTC-stations appear in green in N1MM. After working 2 of those stations who asked both if I wanted QTC and I passed, I googled what it meant. Found a great video from K8UT. After seeing this video I really want to give it a try. The first time exchanging QTC everything went OK. But the second time some lines broke up in transmission. I did panic a little ending up correct lines but then completely messed up the QTC exchange. Lessons learned: just click the lines that are ok, don’t think about touching those which are hosed! Just ask the hosed ones again. Check.

I think I did okay with my score. Propagation was good on 20 and 15 meters. 10 meters was so so. I heard a lot of DX on 10 meter but also extremely QSB which made it hard to work stations.

Posted on
by

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!

Posted on
by

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.