FT-RU 2020 contest review

Event: FT-RoundUp contest 2020 

Section: Single Operator
Logger: N1MM+ / WSJT-X
Station: Icom IC-7300 100W
Antenna: Inverted-V @ 12m

 

Well, actually I did not intend to participate but some of my buddies from the PA6AA contest crew did. They told me to connect N1MM+ with WSJT-X for this contest so I saw a new challenge....took some effort in the end....about that later.

First of all, the weekend, I was planning to mount some christmas lighting, first of all the LED star I mounted last year. A great opportunity to mount the high bands balun I made in the tower between the remote antennatuner and the vertical antenna. Well, I forgot to make a photo, it was not a pretty sight anyway. Over the years I learned the ugliest antennas work the best... After I mounted the LED star in the tower and the tower was straight up I did some testing. Yes, the LED star was working right.....but what about the balun. Well, so far all bands except 12m tuning fine, that was the case before I mounted the balun as well. Did not make contacts with it yet but theoretically there should be less common mode, I can't confirm that. I wished I had less interference on RX but that wasn't the case, it was exactly the same on all bands. Strange enough when trying the antenna during the contest it didn't work.....well, it started raining, something went wrong and I couldn't do anything about it...

Connecting N1MM+ and WSJT-X, it is all described on rttycontesting.com. However, the setup is described for a WWDIGI contest. For this FT-RUcontest I assumed I needed to choose 10m RTTY roundup since I did read somewhere that the FT roundup was made instead of this contest. I don't know why I did choose this but it went wrong. And so when the contest started I had the problem N1MM+ didn't read the received exchange from WSJT-X. A few chat apps with my radio buddies revealed I'd choosen the wrong contest, it should be ARRL RTTY roundup instead. Then everything went well, but unfortunately lost the 3 first contacts, I'm very sorry. Everything went smooth from then on. I had no issues with automatic logging anymore like 2 years ago. And with N1MM connected I could instantly see my score. The bandmap has no real use in this setup, there is a new screen "WSJT-X decode list" in which you see multies, dupes and possible contacts. Not shure how much use this screen has since I didn't look at it much.

Experimental setup N1MM+/WSJT-X

Above a screenshot from the setup. Actually you need big monitors for this, I really didn't have enough space to fit all the screens. But overall you don't need all of them for this contest. I have to write that after a few hours the contest bored me. When running it is only a matter of clicking the "enable TX" button. Everything else goes automatic. So, once and a while I changed running for S&P just to stay alert. I started on saturday evening on 80m only, propagation was average, not many DX and again FT4 was not really present on that band. The propagation was not really good on 15m and 20m on for me on sunday. 40m in the evening went well, some nice DX could be worked but I expected more Japanese stations which I didn't see in the end unfortunately.

Some of the contacts displayed...

But several Indonesian and one Malaysian station were worked on 40m. Not that bad...I'm shure if I had more time more DX (multipliers) could be worked. But time is a issue as always. This time we had a raingutter leakage and some water was pouring into the house below my radioshack. It took time to see were the leakage came from and I couldn't do anything about it since it was already dark outside....well shit happens. I made a emergency repair on Monday so problem solved for this winter.

I decided to try my vertical antenna again Monday evening to see if something changed. What happened? I don't know. All bands tuning fine now, even 12m. I really have no idea why??? I didn't change anything...could be a 12V line interuption....I turned the rotor a little. Have to try while turning the rotor to see if something is wrong....Could be a bad coax cable as well? We'll see. At least the vertical is working again.