Ham Radio – A contact sport

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to prepare my station for the ham radio contest season (I’m late – it’s already well underway). Last weekend, I spent a few hours testing things out during the ARRL Sweepstakes (Phone).

My goal for Sweeps was simple – determine the strengths and weaknesses of my station in preparation for CQ WW CW the following weekend. I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time for a full effort in SS but I thought I could at least:

• Get a better feel for the N1MM contest logger
• Gain some insight into current propagation conditions at the bottom of the sunspot cycle
• Determine what works well in my station and what doesn’t work or needs improvement

So, while it was only a few hours on the air, it was fun.

    Band    QSOs     Pts  Sec
   3.5      20      40    6
     7      24      48   15
    14      57     114   31
Total     101     202   52
Score: 10,504

52 of the 80 ARRL sections was more than I had expected for only 101 QSOs – so that was kinda fun. Looking at the N1MM sections report showed where my system played well and where it lacked:

Wow – without really trying I worked every section in CA but hardly heard anything in Ø-land (where I live). This points to the need for a combination of lowband antennas (both dipoles/NVIS and verticals) to be a true player from the midwest in Sweeps.  I was only on for about 3 hours (while messing around with things like the how-to pages for N1MM), but I expected more local QSOs.

Here are my lessons learned from the Sweepstakes:

• Get your voice keyer/PC ready in advance before a phone contest… Especially the ARRL SSB Sweepstakes. Sweeps (with its long exchange) is brutal without some automation (voice keyer/PC) tied to your logger.
• My low band antenna setup needs some serious work. At the moment it’s just a AlphaDelta DX-B sloper for 80m/160m. I can hear some stations but have trouble working ‘em.  The tuner built into my IC-746 can’t cover the full range of 80m or 160m with this antenna. Not having an amp doesn’t help either.  If I had some high trees in the area I’d be looking at a Inv-L. If I had more space a dipole might be an option. I still might shunt feed the tower, but probably not this week.  The sloper is too narrow and doesn’t seem to work well at my QTH (yet anyway).

  At this point in the sunspot cycle, the lowbands are critical in a contest.  I wish there was an easy answer for this but not yet.

• Get your contest logging package kinks worked out. As my setup was a quick-and-dirty (minimal prep prior to the contest) effort, I had a few issues with N1MM. Eventually, I was able to work those out and learn from the mistakes.
• Read the rules… I knew I wasn’t going to make a serious effort in SS, so I just jumped in after listening to a few QSOs and browsing the posted rules. I ended up using the B precendent (high power – even though I don’t own an amplifier) because I didn’t carefully read the rules.  Oh well.

Last night, I spent some time working on resurrecting my K1EL WinKey (v3). I thought I had smoked it long ago trying to power it from a 9V battery while setting it up for communications to my PocketPC. After that, K1EL posted a small program to do just what I was trying to do (and mentioned the need for a diode – duh, I shoulda thought of that!).

Anyway, that seems to be working. I worked some DX on 40m while working on this – including V5/DJ4SO Namibia, J3/DF8AN Grenada, CEØ/OE2SNL Easter Island, HC8N Galapagos, and 3DAØZO Swaziland which was a new one for me.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in the contest.

.  .