I spent some more time on this contest than last year and had much better results. All sorts of DX. I had quite a few contacts on 15m which is new to me, usually it’s pretty dead. I had my typical troubles on 40 and almost none on 80m due to the low height of my off center fed dipole. Summary:Band QSOs Zones Countries—————————— 80: 5 4 5 40: 36 9 27 20: 139 16 58 15: 48 13 32 10: 2 2 2——————————Total: 230 44 123 Total…
I’ve been traveling a bit and haven’t had much to report in the radio dept. I brought my radio on my last trip expecting the AirBnB to be on the top floor but it turned out to be on the 2nd floor and surrounded by buildings so I didn’t even bother trying to setup the KX2. When I returned I had a QSL card in the mail from N3BB. Our QSO was during the last CW contest. He also sent a hand written invitation to buy his ham radio novel, Contact Sport, so I did. I’m looking forward to reading it.
I teamed up with Rich AA2MF and Tom W4CU from SPARC and FCG for the North American QSO Party RTTY July contest. Our team name was THREE-FIFTHS, since we couldn’t find the 2 others to fill out the team. Turns out those missing two were smart, Rich emailed after the contest and said it was the worst, “It was like my antennas were disconnected”. I’d have to agree with that statement. I set out to get more contacts than in the February version of this contest where I got 254, I didn’t even get close with 139. Along with terrible band conditions, there was an hour long lightning storm that…
This past weekend was IARU HF Championship. This is a mixed mode contest (CW & SSB) where you try to contact all the different countries radio associations. Lots of them have special callsigns ending in HQ. I ended up with 300 contacts over 15.5 of the 24 hours of the contest. I was pretty beat at 2am and called it a night. I got up for the last hour(it ends at 8am) and got it up to 300 and went back to bed. I made a few contacts into Hawaii, one into Asiatic Russia with my antenna aiming over the North Pole, and also one to New Zealand. We’ll see…
Besides the GB13COL I had a pretty easy time with this event this year. I got into it right at is was starting and got a few stations. I struggled to hear K2Z but finally had a clear signal from him on the sixth. I got a few of them on CW which was easy. GB13COL was a mess though. When I could hear him there were tons of Alpha Hotel’s yelling on top of him, I just didn’t have the patience to deal with it. This event seems to bring out the people who don’t know the DX Code of Conduct, or they’re just dickheads, probably the worst pileup…
I joined the Florida Contest Group (FCG) and also subscribed to the National Contest Journal magazine. In the latest issue they have an article about how they won’t be printing the entire contest results in the magazine anymore yet my callsign still made it to print for the February RTTY contest. FCG creates teams with funny names for this contest, I’m second string but I’ll work my way up. 22nd place isn’t great but its cool they list out all the teams and that I’m on one. Here’s the full page: ORANGE SQUEEZERS-1 came in 6th place with only 3 participants, one of which was Rich AA2MF who’s the secretary…
This weekend was ARRL Field Day. This is also my 100th blog post, Yay! I was on the committee for Field Day this year. We had conference calls and did a dry run to make sure we had all the connectors and accessories we needed. Quite a bit of planning is required to make this event go smoothly. It was again a joint effort between the St Pete Amateur Radio Club, the Clearwater Amateur Radio Society and the Upper Pinellas Amateur Radio Club. The 3 clubs get along well so it’s a good fit. We use the Clearwater Fire Training Center to setup at as we have the last 2…
Dan K1TO sent a post to the Florida Contest Group about how to do the ARRL VHF contest using 6m so I figured I’d try it. I mostly worked on my app and just flipped back to WSJT-X to check to see if there were any new callsigns available to work every once and awhile. Most were in Florida. Dan is about 30 miles away from my house and I watched him work a lot of stations that I couldn’t hear, but he definitely had some slow times as well. On 6m meters, sometimes there’s just nothing there, then it opens up and you can hear NY for 5 minutes….
I found this contest to be a bit harder than it’s WW cousin. In this one you send a serial number, the other is just your CQ zone. I definitely improved me CW number recognition skills but 206 contacts over almost 15 hours isn’t a good score. I’ll get there eventually. I’m working on an iPhone app for morse code practice. More on that in a future post. Here’s a map of the contacts I made in this contest.
Day 2 was hotter than Day 1 but I had the lay of the land so I did the flea market in the morning and watched the air conditioned forums in the afternoon. Today I hit traffic on the way in, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the way out yesterday. The flea market is massive here. I spent over 2 hours looking through it. I came across this guy (forgot to get his callsign), he was running a net from the flea market on an old Vietnam era field radio. The net was for people operating for old military radios. This is another section of the hobby…
