Wednesday, October 21, 2020

JARTS RTTY on vy low power

 I've been active on 40m quite a lot last week. Experimenting with JS8Call, since I want to find out what interesting use it actually has for me. At the end of the week some complaints from neighbours came in. Loosing internet connection, others lost TV and telephone line. Of course, with a large tower in the backyard, you're a suspect. Especially when the internet company service engineer is telling that my transmitter is probabely the cause of all misery. The problem is well known and is related to the sensitive VDSL2 modems/line. Placing HAM band notches from the provider site will solve the problem as it did 4 years ago at my own home.

I decided to do the JARTS RTTY contest with very low power (20W) just to not cause RFI. If everything goes well the problem will be solved this week just before this weekends CQWW SSB contest.


With 20W it takes certainly a longer time to get some stations in the log. But with the excellent setup the IC-7300 offers I was able to pick some DX. Congrats to them for picking up my tiny signal. And yes, I heard quite a lot of other DX but it is really hard without 100W. In the end I worked 154 QSO's and 40 DXCC.

I also decided to do some maintenance to my tower/antennas. I removed the 4/6m yagi for the winter. It will be in the mast again next year. I also installed the 60m band sloper again. In the contest I made some contacts on 20m with the 60m band sloper since it received very well on that band....I was surprised. It did much better as my all band vertical on top of the mast. Especially to the USA in which the direction of the sloper is. I'm now thinking about adding wires to have a multiband sloper.

The "naked" boom ready to store in the garage.

2 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

Toch mooi resultaat met 20 watt, alhoewel voor mij is dat nog geen vy low power ;-) maar RTTY natuurlijk wel. Echter, dat is voor mij de reden dat ik geen rtty gebruik. 73 Paul

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hallo Paul, ja ook RTTY kan met QRP of QRPp hoor. Echter hoe lager het vermogen hoe langer het duurt voordat ze je horen. Daar liep ik met 20W al tegenaan. En in een contest is tijd natuurlijk ook belangrijk. 73, Bas