Tag: RTTY

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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!