#10m ARRL contest - second day

 I know, it looks like this weblog is only about contesting these days. And yes, at the moment I haven't got much time for the projects I want to write about. I have ideas enough but time is another story...

Day two of the 10m ARRL contest is over, at least for me. After sunset the band is closed so I switched computers and radio off. Propagation was better compared to yesterday. Although at some moments over the day I didn't hear any signal when fifteen minutes later signals from over S9 could be received. You can view that in the video I shot from some SSB signals. Of course we all wish for an opening between Europe and the USA. Since this contest is most populair on the other side of the ocean and so most participants can be found in the USA. I was only able to receive N4BP from Florida with weak signals, I was not heard by him. Though PB7Z Bernard who lives 50km south of me did manage to make a QSO. I also heard stations from Germany and Ireland having pile-ups with USA stations. They probabely had a lot of luck and very good antennas. I had to do with some Europe/Scandinavia/Russia and only a few DX stations. At least I was lucky to work D4Z from Cape Verde (on SSB!) and ZD7BG from St.Helena (CW)....not a bad catch considering the bad propagation. Unfortunately I didn't hear any south America this evening.

So, I end this contest with 57 QSO and 29 DXCC in the log. It is not the worst 10m ARRL contest at all for me, but not the best either. It was certainly better compared to last year.  It is what to expect in low sunspot years.

As always it was fun. 10m is almost like the magic 6m band. You never know what to expect and there is always DX that can be worked. Let's see what next year will bring us!

#10m ARRL contest - first day

 Well, in the previous years I did some band condition investigations in the week before this 10m contest. There was no time to do it this year. We had some fantastic propagation on 10m last weeks, but not this weekend. When I switched the radio on this morning I was disappointed, only noise could be heard. After a while I heard FR4QT from Reunion on SSB, but he didn't hear me unfortunately. I guess he's using some power and I only use 100W. I heard a few weak signals on CW but too weak to decode. I decided it would be a waste of time and effort to stay on the radio. So I went outside to do other things and returned after a while and a nice cup of coffee. This time I heard some CW signals and was fortunate enough to make a few QSOs. Later on I even managed to work some on SSB. The strange thing is that some of the signals came up till S9 and then vanished a few seconds later. And of course the same thing as always, I hear far more compared to what I can work with my 100W. The benefit of a low noise environment and a LFA beam I guess. When all signals vanished again I decided to do some other things in the afternoon and return just before sunset. At the evening greyline the propagation lifted a bit. I was able to work V51WH Gunther from Namibia again and a few from Brazil on CW. Best DX was on SSB with LW5HR from Argentina on SSB (+11000km). Not bad for a bad 10m propagation day! I worked 17 stations from 11 DXCC for the first day, hopefully tomorrow will be a bit better, we'll see...

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.