PocketPC ham radio apps, links, DXPedition Map, and more.
Ham Radio Contesting /M with a PocketPC PDA
Raise your hand if this has happened to you. You're driving the XYL to the market on a Saturday afternoon and decide to sit in the parking lot and play with the radio while she shops. Tuning around a bit, you hear an interesting contest. You think to yourself, "I've probably got an hour or two to waste sitting out here and I'd love to jump into the contest, but it's one I'm not familiar with... I don't know the bands, exchange, times, sponsors,... I guess I'll have to take a pass."
Well, one possibility would be to take along all your prized ham radio magazines and hope junior doesn't use it to mop up a spilled Big-Gulp. Maybe you could just keep a paper calendar in the car with notes on the rules, contest exchanges, and so on; then markup the calendar with the contest timing (let's see... is Field Day the 3rd weekend in June or the 4th... who remembers those things anyway?). OR you could simply whip out your trusty PocketPC PDA and pull up the contest calendar.
I use the AvantGo service to synchronize my iPAQ once a week with these two great links from WA7BNM: http://www.hornucopia.com/contestcal/weeklycont.html
and his annual calendar:
http://www.hornucopia.com/contestcal/contestcal.html
AvantGo is a useful (free) utility that allows PocketPC and Palm users to download virtually any webpage for later use. You can setup AvantGo to pull down USAToday news headlines or set it up to monitor your own webpage.
By the way, my thanks to WA7BNM for providing a great resource to contesters. You can see that his site includes the exchange, bands, modes, time, classes... pretty much everything you need to jump into a ham radio contest in a nutshell. Great for that spur of the moment impulse in the parking lot. You can always look up the full rules when you get home if you don't have full internet access to your PocketPC PDA while on the road.
Not only does this help me in the "stranded in the parking lot during a hot contest" scenario, but I'm also able to plan ahead when my wife asks "you're not planning on doing any ham radio stuff six Saturdays from now, are you?" - simply by having the full contest calendar available on my belt.
Of course, if you're also using Microsoft Outlook and keep your schedule sync'ed up on your PocketPC - you'll also know if you have any non-ham radio conflicts on that day.
If you'd like to log your QSOs on your PocketPC PDA while operating /M, MobileLog supports a "Pileup mode". In this mode, you can keep entering QSOs without having to reenter frequency, mode, band, etc. Just pop in a new call, enter exchange info in the notes field, click "+" to add it and work the next one!
See you in the pileups.
11-Jan-2007