Tag: contest

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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?

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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!

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Yes, my first CW-contest! This weekend I participated in the last big world wide contest of 2013 and in CW-modus none the less. OK I admit, my CW-skills are not yet at 25-30wpm so I had to rely on CW-skimmer for a lot of contacts. But it was the best CW-training I ever did! At the end of the weekend I started to copy calls at over 30 wpm.

I didn’t worked new countries this contest, but had great fun. Propagation was still good. Especially on 10 meters I made great contacts (even with New Zealand)! For this time of year I think that’s cool. I wonder how many months we can enjoy these good propagation at the top of the sun cycle.

Ending on Sunday night with 300 Q’s in the log and deep respect for my fellow amateurs who copy my call so quickly and error-less.
It was a great experience and I’m entering more CW-contests in the future. Maybe soon without CW-skimmer 🙂