Tag: PACC 2010

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PACCWhow, PACC 2010 was a awesome experience! 12:00 UTC I went off for as much as qso’s as possible in 24 hours at the club. My strategy was to work the high bands early and slowly go down towards 80 and 160. I went into the night with 233 qso’s and stuck on 80 meters. Then the really hard time was there. Along the night I only made 50 qso’s on 80 and 160 meter.
It was a pretty cool experience to witness the 20 meter band opening up in the morning. First I could work all Dutch stations and a half hour later I worked the whole world again.

The HF beam (10, 15 and 20) was working great. Only on 15 I had a little feedback when I pointed it towards east. The 80m and 40m open dipole wires also worked great! I’m convinced that we have to have more mono band dipoles with bandfilters, so we will be able to work contests with more people with the club call.

Score for this PACC: 435 qso’s, 50.025 claimed points.
Very exciting about my first pileup, my first pileup hijack, first 24 hour nonstop contest and so on. I think I’m officially Rookie off 😉

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With the PACC 2010 coming up, I’m getting all jumpy to get my “ultimate contest setup” complete. My plans are to participate in the PACC this year from our club location NERA. Last year I’ve take a look and made a few QSO’s from that location and it is fantastic to operate from there. Far from the inhabited world there is zero QRM. Very nice when you sometimes have to pick up weak signals.
The idea now is to setup my Kenwood TS-850SAT at this location. The TS-850 has a build in voice keyer, but this keyer is not able to repeat the message with an adjustable delay. So I’ll use my own homebrew voice keyer. I already tested with success my headset. It works fine, so now I only have to find a decent foot pedal to switch between receiving and transmitting. Of course I can buy a foot pedal in an instrument shop or something like that. But that is expensive and less fun. So I searching for a solution for that.
Then I’ve hands free for logging. I think I bring my MSI netbook with me for logging. Only thing is I have to find a good contestlogging program. My main rig controller is Ham Radio Deluxe, but that is not quite feasible for contest logging. N1MM makes Windows crashing when it interacts thru the Keyspan USA-19H USB-RS232-adapter to my rig. So that doesn’t seem a solution. I already take a look at many logging programs, but they are all so old and ugly and don’t do rig control (which I want for logging the complete QSO). So I didn’t figure out that one yet.
If you have any good suggestions, please send me a message!