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.