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.

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…

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…

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.

The new version of WSJT-X v2.10-rc5 was released yesterday which includes a new FT4 mode. This mode is designed to compete with RTTY for contesting. It uses a 6 second transmission vs. the 15 second transmission of FT8. It definitely feels much faster than FT8 but I personally feel it should be it’s own contest mode vs being used in RTTY contests. We’ll see how it all plays out over time.