ARRL DX CW 2013

I know that I’m a bit late in writing this up, but I’ve been busy.

Last weekend saw me making a relatively serious effort in the CW installment of the ARRL DX contest.

Most of my contesting experience has involved my trolling up and down the open bands, working every station that I can copy. I have started making a point at finding frequencies to run in RTTY contests, and in phone contests, in the unlikely event I can find an open frequency, I’ll plop down and see if anyone can hear my low-power CQ. But experimentation has shown that I have a ways to go before I can run CW without embarrassing myself.

Well, I went into this contest with my head full of tips picked up at the YCCC Contest University, and I figured I would try something a little different. Instead of a purely “search and pounce” strategy, I undertook a “click and pounce” approach: I opened N1MM to a DX cluster, turned on the deluge of skimmer spots, and filtered for spots coming from this corner of the world. I’d find the most recently-spotted multiplier on the band I was active on (or most recently spotted station, if no new mults were near the top of the pile), click on it, fine-tune, and work the station. Then I’d consult the list of spots, and repeat.

I will say that it wasn’t as much fun, in some respects, as trolling up and down the bands, where each new signal is a surprise waiting to be discovered (“Germany”, “Germany”, “Italy”, “Poland”, “oooh, Tanzania!”). But the loss of that kind of fun was replaced by two different enjoyable aspects:

First, given my fumbling with CW, it takes me a few repetitions to correctly copy a callsign and contest information. In S&P, I sometimes have to sit and lurk for a little while to figure out who I’m listening to. However, with C&P, I have a clue as to what I should be listening for, significantly reducing the length of time it takes for me to understand what I’m hearing.

Second, that faster comprehension rate, combined with having the computer quickly jumping the rig to the next frequency, means that I could get into a pretty snappy rhythm for much of the contest. That additional speed made for a pleasant rush during much of the contest.

Band conditions during the contest were interesting, with that interestingness aggravated by a coronal hole affecting the ionosphere for the last 6 hours or so of the contest. By band:

160 meters: I have trouble getting outside the eastern US on 160 with my current antenna farm. That’s not useful during a contest where US stations are only allowed to work DX. I kept an eye on 160 to see when the one Bermuda station I knew was active went there, grabbed the multiplier, and didn’t otherwise waste time on the band. I understand from commentary on the 3830 reflector that 160 was nasty even without antenna issues.

80 meters: when conditions are good, 80 is a great band for me. Well Friday night, 80 was very noisy locally. Stations were workable, but it wasn’t a cakewalk. Saturday night, conditions were much, much better. My DXCC count on 80 is now quite a bit higher than it previously had been. One of the highlights involved working a handful of Hawaiian stations right at their sunset Saturday.

40 meters: not normally a good band for me, thanks to a high noise floor and a couple of inconveniently-oriented nulls. Despite that, conditions were good Friday evening (I had no trouble working my first Asian station on 40). Saturday was disappointing. And Sunday, I “should” have spent the last couple of hours on 40, but conditions were just downright nasty.

15 & 20 meters: both bands were generally good for me during daylight hours, despite quite a bit of auroral flutter. I’ve written previously about how difficult it is for me to hear or be heard in Japan; well, probably the most incredible moment for me in the contest was on Sunday, about an hour before local sunset, when 15 meters filled up with loud, clear, workable Japanese signals. Heck, I even worked a couple of QRP JA’s without needing repeats on either side.

10 meters: I never saw an opening to Europe. I would just pop up here in between band-changes between 15 and 20, to see if the band had opened, and to pick up stray Caribbean and South American stations.

So, the end result:

 Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty
  1.8       1       3    1
  3.5     110     330   44
    7     142     426   52
   14     341    1023   81
   21     222     666   82
   28      46     138   28
Total     862    2586  288
Score: 744,768

All told, I worked 97 DXCC entities in the contest, including four new ones (ITU HQ, Tunisia, Oman, and St. Vincent), spanning all 7 continents.

That was fun.

Eureka! MMTTY Working FSK Again (I Hope)

For the past few months, my exploits at working RTTY have been slightly foiled because neither MMTTY nor MMVARI would key the FSK-keyer on my Navigator interface.   Both programs had been happy over the summer, but one day this fall they started complaining “cannot open COM port,” believing the port in use. 

While I’ve been able to confirm that Windows does indeed register the FSK COM port in use, I have never been able to track down the offending software or driver.  And, while I’ve been annoyed, I haven’t been annoyed enough to wipe the hard drive and rebuild the machine from scratch.

The workaround up until today has been to use MixW, which is happy to use the COM port in spite of it registering as “in use”, for chasing DX, ragchewing, and contesting, and to occasionally use MMTTY (or, more usually, N1MM+MMTTY) in AFSK mode when I didn’t want to fire up MixW.

This has been OK, but the arrangement annoys me for a couple of reasons.  First, I’m trying to wean myself off Ham Radio Deluxe (which I like, but maybe not enough to upgrade when the new owners take it commercial) onto the DXLab suite (which relies on MMTTY for RTTY).  And second, while MixW does OK for RTTY contests when the contest exchange is a state or a number, it’s not really laid out efficiently for other exchanges which it can’t auto-grab, like the name exchange in the upcoming NAQP RTTY test.

So, I’ve been searching for a solution…and I think I might have one.  I found a utility called Virtual Serial Ports Emulator, which (among other things) has the ability to create a virtual serial port and map it to a physical port.

MMTTY » EXTFSK » Virtual COM port » (VSPE) » FSK COM port seems to work in my limited testing so far.   I need to go find a couple of big pileups and give it a real workout, however, to see if it might be an acceptable workaround to my woes.

VSPE is freeware for 32-bit users, but has a $30 license fee for 64-bit use.   And, as a non-disclaimer, I have nothing to do with the company.   Heck, I’m not even positive that it’s a good fix yet – I still need to stress-test the arrangement before I’m fully comfortable.

However, as Google has turned up no information about others having this particular problem with N1MM/MMTTY/MMVARI/WinWarbler, I thought I’d put this possible fix out on the interwebs for others to consider.

CQ WPX RTTY

When not fighting with the proto-antenna, I spent much of the weekend’s radio time playing in the CQ WPX RTTY contest, where the object is (in addition to working as many stations as possible) to work as many callsign prefixes as possible.

There are three installments – CW, Phone, and RTTY.  CW and Phone will be in a few weeks.  All three have a certain attraction to me because there is a “Rookie” overlay category, and I’m not above taking pleasure in getting good results when there isn’t much competition.

This was, as indicated by the title of the post, the RTTY chapter of this year’s WPX contests.  If you’ve read my prior posts, you’re quite aware that I love RTTY contests.  The sound of the diddles is just cool, and my rig has good filtering for FSK RTTY, so it’s less of a chore trying to copy a signal (my issue with phone) or in decoding the signal (as CW doesn’t come naturally to me).  And, while I don’t have a real contest setup here, I can at least sit back and enjoy the beauty of watching propagation change.

I started in thinking that if I could keep my butt in the chair through 200-300 contacts, I’d consider it a success.  However, as always seems to be the case, I might have gotten carried away:

        Band     QSOs    Pts  WPX
         3.5      91     236   50
           7     126     460   66
          14     206     451  103
          21     173     378   88
          28      67     146   35
       Total     663    1671  342

            Score : 571,482

…and that was even with several breaks to spend time with the wife, to wrangle on antenna work, and to sleep.   I wonder how I would have done if I had spent the full 30 hours on the air.

Last year, the high US SOAB LP rookie score was 154,031, and the high US SOAB HP score was 251,489, so I feel pretty good with those results.  Looks like this score would have gotten me 4th place among rookies worldwide.   It remains to be seen how many rookie submissions there are this year, or how my score stands after log-checking.

There were quite a few folks who struggled with decoding my call.  I’m probably in more than a few logs as “AB1O”, “AB1OB”, and the like.   I tried correcting those errors when I witnessed them.  It makes me wonder how many calls or exchanges I might have muffed.  The scoring report should make for interesting reading.

Aside from a bit of an addictive/compulsive streak in me, perhaps part of the reason I went so gung-ho in this contest was that I joined the Yankee Clipper Contest Club this past week.   I had been meaning to check things out with that organization for a while now, but to join one must attend a meeting, and the YCCC has an unfortunate habit of scheduling meetings at times that I have other commitments.   But the YCCC held a Contest University at ARRL headquarters in Newington Thursday evening.  I attended, picked up a few tips, and turned in an application.

The tips seemed like common sense, and were understandably geared more towards big phone and CW contests.  But it did help to have an external influence reminding me that if I want to have fun generating a big score, I shouldn’t dilly-dally in struggling to work cool DX pileups I might encounter.

RTTY contests are, currently, the only contests I feel comfortable attempting to run a frequency.  Although I need to train myself to do this more consistently, I usually did plop myself down whenever I found a clear frequency and called CQ.  However, I only got a couple of good runs in.  Most of my time was spent S&P-ing, since I seem to have a fairly decent rate doing so.

40 meters continues to be challenging for me, partly because of a high noise level and inconveniently placed nulls on my antenna, but also because Friday and Saturday evenings the band was a zoo – wall to wall, frequently overlapping RTTY signals.  Still, given the WPX scoring (more points on the low bands), I slugged it out there.

20 meters seemed less zoo-like, and with the drop in sunspot activity, it was generally the most profitable band.   15 meters was good for DX, productive but not crowded, when open.

10 meters was disappointing.  I didn’t encounter much activity there Saturday (but I did take most of the afternoon off, so I might not be a good judge).  For a couple of hours Sunday, however, signals from Europe were quite strong even given in spite of my antenna not being too good on that band.   I spent more time than I probably should have on 10m because of that…but not enough other competitors got the memo that 10 was open.

Still, it was a lot of fun.  I just hope that I can recover in time for the DX contest this coming weekend.

Recent Radio Antics

You know, I thought I had made quite a bit of progress on getting a new antenna up for 160, when I suffered two setbacks:

First, another branch that was broken and dangling high in a tree from the October storm came down in a windstorm this past week, pinning my inverted L.   Now whenever the wind blows, the wire is getting disconnected from the balun.   If I am going to keep that antenna as a long-term part of the farm, I’m going to have to put up a new wire, as I simply cannot free the existing one.  

However, I’m postponing putting up that new wire, as there are still a few more broken branches waiting to come down, and because I’ve been working on building what I’m calling a “drunken doublet” – a 160 meter dipole that weaves/bends among several trees at the back of the property.   Models suggest that it will be no worse (and probably better) than the L for top-band work.   I want to get it up before the 160m phone contest in a couple of weeks.

I had thought I was getting close to my goal Saturday when I did something stupid.   I had a 133-foot length of wire just about where I wanted it, when I pulled on the rope at the “far end” of the wire a little too hard.  The mason’s line I had tied to the balun-end of the wire slipped off, and that end of the wire was now dangling in the air, 20 feet out of reach.  Rather than climbing a tree to bring it back to earth, I finished pulling the wire all the way through the trees…and now I have to re-weave that side of the antenna.   Drat!  And that wire was just where I wanted it.   Annoyingly, it was too breezy to get a guide-line re-woven before it started getting dark.

I was doing this while taking a break from the CQ WPX RTTY contest.  It was a nice day outside, and it seemed like a FB idea to sacrifice some points to enjoy the day, especially if it meant I might be able to try the new antenna “under fire” that evening.   Sadly, that didn’t happen.

More on the contest in another post.

A Weekend of Futzing on the Radio

So, this past weekend saw a hodge-podge of vradio activities.

Yes, I did get a little bit of contesting in. I made a few contacts in both the CQ 160 CW contest, and in the BARTG RTTY Sprint. However, I was a little disappointed with the RTTY contest — admittedly, I had other obligations during the best time to work Europe at this time of the year, but the little bit I was on saw stations in the north half of Europe and some R9 stations difficult-to-impossible to work due to auroral flutter.

The 160m contest was a little more interesting, but humbling. I’ve written previously about my challenges in getting onto top band, and I took this opportunity to confirm some suspicions of mine — my inverted L is heard better on 160 than my Carolina Windom, but the Windom hears better on top band than the L. Despite having the opportunity to do such testing…well, propagation seemed decent at times, and it was frustrating actually hearing plenty of DX, but not getting heard by those stations. Next free weekend with decent weather, I’m going to be cooking up another antenna for 160. Hopefully that will occur before the CQ 160 phone test, as that seems the last chance this season to really stress test any new creation.

During other radio-playtimes, I did a bit more DX-chasing, trying to fill in a few more band/mode combinations on HK0NA, VP6T, and TN2T. Also, some discussion after the local VE session got me curious to see how I was doing on Diamond DXCC, the a special award commemorating the 75th anniversary of DXCC, where the object is to work 100 1937-era entities within the year. It seems that although I’ve worked 85 modern DXCC entities so far this year, I’ve only worked 61 1937 entities.

And last, but not least, I had some time this weekend to experiment with jPskMail, a utility that links with fldigi to use various soundcard modes to bridge over RF to an internet connection. It’s an alternative to using PACTOR/Winmor for Winlink 2000 HF messaging. It seems intriguing, but the current edition of fldigi has a nasty habit of locking up on my machine…and it seems to want a POP-enabled email account on the internet side, which I no longer have. (I have one “throwaway” account that is currently pop-enabled, but it requires SSL connections. I’m guessing that’s why I’ve failed to connect….)

All-in-all, it wasn’t a terribly exciting weekend radio-wise, but I still enjoyed myself.

HK0NA and VP6T

The rate at which I’m accumulating new DXCC entities is slowing. I’ve worked all the countries that are “easy” to get from my QTH, and am now having to rely on DXpeditions to remote locations, spots of uncommon entities, and exceptional band openings to add to my count. In almost 9 months on HF, I’ve worked 180 DXCC entities (152 confirmed so far).

Entities 179 and 180 are Malpelo Island and Pitcairn Island, respectively, thanks to the HK0NA and VP6T. Both stations have been loud here during the appropriate band openings, and the biggest challenge has been getting through the pileups. I wouldn’t mind getting both stations on a few more bands or other modes…but I’m just happy to have them in the log at all.

Probably the coolest thing about DXpeditions like these is that many of them are posting logs to the net when resource permits. Heck, it looks like VP6T is uploading to Logbook of the World as they go; I already have a LoTW confirmation back from them.

hk0na

vp6t

A Tale of Two NAQPs + Miscellaneous Other Activities

So, the past two weekends have seen the CW and SSB installments of the winter North American QSO Party. Unfortunately, my wife has been going through a rough spell recently, but that has meant that I’ve needed to stay “accessible but quiet”.and in my house that makes for good radio time (at least for CW, digital, and phone-with-voice keyer).

So, I had the opportunity to put in nearly full-time effort into both tests, helped by the fact that the NAQP tests only run 12 hours, and single-operators can be active for only 10 of the 12, leaving plenty of time during the rest of the weekend to do chores, tackle honey-do lists, tend to disabled spouses, etc.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a certificate for having the high score from Connecticut in the July 2011 NAQP-CW, with 253 Q’s and 123 multipliers, which seems respectable given my inexperience, even if you ignore that I “won” Connecticut by virtue of being the only person to submit a log from the state. Combine that with a bit more experience and confidence, I was interested in seeing how I could do.

I think I might have done OK this time:

          CW         SSB
Band   Q's Mult   Q's Mult
160m    35  21     20  16
 80m   126  37    100  34
 40m    64  30     45  24
 20m    76  33     52  28
 15m    54  20     75  32
 10m    11   6     28  15
TOTAL  366 147    320 149
SCORE   53,802     47,680

On the CW test, I got started late and missed much of the time 10m would have been productive, and as noted in my prior post, I operated off the “wrong” antenna until I went to 80m. I operated strictly in search-and-pounce mode, since even though my CW is improving, it’s nowhere near good enough for me to feel comfortable calling “CQ TEST”. 80 and 160 both had very low noise levels, making it a pleasure to hunt on those bands.

I hadn’t expected to compete on my own for the SSB test. At the local ARES EOC, there had been talk of giving the station a workout by playing in this test…but due to weather, conflicting schedules, etc. I was free to participate in my own. Several times during this test I thought about putting up my headset, since I’m not really a big fan of working phone, especially in crowded conditions, with just wire antennas, and just the most basic filters available to me. It’s just too…messy.

Aggravating matters was the fact that a CME hit that afternoon, and the bands were extremely noisy for much of the test. Phone on 40 meters is always a challenge for me due to a high local noise floor on the band, but during the contest it was positively ugly. The only saving grace was that I discovered along the way that an RFI issue I’ve had seems to have been accidentally resolved: in the past I have had to avoid transmitting between 7200 and 7300MHz on the Carolina Windom because I would get noise on the house alarm system. Perhaps this is a fringe benefit of adding a manual tuner, with its own grounding strip, to the station.

I had planned to operate strictly search-and-pounce during the contest. It may not be optimal strategy, but the fun of turning the VFO to see who I find next more than makes up for that. However, late on Saturday evening, after the noise level dropped a little, I came across a quiet frequency on 80m. I asked “is this frequency in use?”, actually had someone respond back “no”…and thus started a decent run. Considering how much fun that was, I really ought to try calling CQ more often.

I’m looking forward to the RTTY installment in a couple of weeks. As I’ve noted in a few prior tests, I think RTTY contests are my favorite.

A few other activities of note:

Connecticut ARES has had a couple of mini-tests on HF in the past few weeks. Two weekends ago, the experiment was to try to reach a station in North Carolina at prescribed times on 40-160m. 40m was difficult due to the proximity to a broadcast station. 60m was challenging in that interested parties found whether or not they had any 80m capabilities. 80m wasn’t too bad. 160m was challenging on both ends, with a couple of interested stations discovering that they couldn’t tune their antennas on the designated frequencies, stations like mine getting confirmation that running barefoot on topband can be difficult, and the station on the other end perhaps not having the best 160m antenna in the world either.

This past weekend, someone in New Haven County had an interest in conducting a couple of propagation tests on 60m. Participating stations heard each other very well at midday, but after sunset…well, the band had gone long and communications weren’t possible. The results weren’t surprising, but it’s nice to see a bit of local ARES interest in 60m in particular, and HF in general.

The ARRL January VHF test was also this past weekend. I don’t have good antennas for anything above 25MHz, but I still tuned around the bands, made a few contacts, and picked up a couple of new grids. My participation was marred, however, by my power supply deciding to seemingly randomly shut down when transmitting. This, of course, happened after I ran into a couple of folks who wanted to QSY for a short QSO. To them, I just disappeared from the band. I suspect RF was getting in somewhere, so I disconnected and reconnected every power and coax cable I could find. I’m crossing my fingers that my theory is correct and that I tightened whatever was loose; I haven’t had the issue crop up since.

Coming up next weekend is the CQ 160m test. Unless my wife has other chores for me, that should make for an interesting opportunity to see how the L and the Carolina Windom (using a manual tuner on both) compare to one another on top band. I’ve only loaded up the Carolina Windom a couple of times on 160m, while my L was inoperative, and my suspicion is that the L is the better antenna on that band…but I’m looking forward to the chance to put that to the test. Here’s hoping for a low noise floor!