CQ WW RTTY contest 2015 report

Event: CQ WW RTTY 2015

Logger: N1MM+ most updated version
Station: Icom IC-706MKIIG (power max. 50W)
Antenna: Vertical HF multiband antenna at 9m AGL.

RTTY is not really my favorite mode, it is slow and not really sensitive and makes a lot of noise on the bands. I always look at the nice list of announced DX operations from NG3K to see if it would be interesting to take part in this contest. And yes, this time it was PJ6A and E51AAR that were needed for ATNO's. As always time for me is limited. I really need to wake up early to do some contesting, no time at "daylight". So a couple of hours in early in the morning and a few at Sunday evening. Not really good times to work the DX. Although I setup and update N1MM+ contestlogger last week already I ended up with a very slow starting software Saturday morning. Suddenly all function keys were gone as well after startup. None of them working either. Trying to figure it out and after a few restarts the function keys were there again. I tried MMTTY as decoder first, it worked well, but missed the waterfall screen.

So, I switched over to MMVARI later with the strange effect F4 didn't work anymore. I switched back to MMTTY and F4 works....a bug? I decided to reconfigure F6 to give my call twice in S&P so I could continue working with MMVARI. I still think DM780 from HRD is much easier when working on digimodes/RTTY but unfortenately has other issues and is not really a contestlogger. All this hassle took me over a hour precious contesttime. Sometimes even preparing before a contest doesn't help, I blame it all on Murphy. I think it is still a miracle that I worked PJ6A. Their signal was weak on 15m but came up just at the start of the greyline at Sunday evening, it was a hard QSO but I managed it finally. I better say they managed to get my call correct finally. I saw a E51 spotted several times, not shure it was E51AAR? But did not see him on screen. Wrong time wrong place of course...

Here a list of best DX:

80m: no real DX, best distance ES9C (Estonia). Did hear USA but very weak.
40m: P49X (Aruba), W9SN (TN, USA take a look at their antennas!), VA2UP (Canada)
20m: A61ZX (UAE), K1SFA (CT USA, got a 88 instead of 73...look at her page!), HK1T (Colombia), D4C (Cape verde), PT2CM (Brazil)
15m: KP2M (US Virgin Isl.), P49X/P40BC (Aruba), W8QR (CO USA), PY5VC (Brazil), VC7X (BC Canada), PJ6A (Saba), YV5KG (Venezuela)
10m: LV1F/LT0H (Argentina)