ARRL DX SSB (or: Ow, My Ear Hertz!)

This past weekend saw the 2012 running of the phone portion of the ARRL DX contest.

I debated about whether/how much I would push in this weekend’s event.   I wanted to send the YCCC a few points at least, but I don’t have the best station in the world to compete in a phone contest.   And, frankly, phone tests are just too darned messy for my tastes, especially since my filtering and antennas can’t really compete with real contest stations.  I end up having a hard time making sense from all the noise.

Over at the local EOC there has been talk off and on about using a contest as a possibly fun way to give the HF station a workout, and this seemed like a good opportunity.   I ended up doing much of the heavy lifting, as I live near enough to the EOC to be over at odd/prime hours, and as other folks were even more put off by phone contest messiness than I am.

Although it’s hard for me to tell given unfamiliarity with how that station plays, conditions didn’t seem very good.   There were plenty of non-Northern Europeans at the expected times, and a bumper crop of folks from the Caribbean and South America.   However, I heard only faint murmurs from Japan on Saturday evening, and nothing at all on Sunday.  Sadly, I utterly failed at my real goal for the contest, finally getting Alaska on 40m and 80m (Alaska is off the end of my wire at home, but broadside to the wire at the EOC).

The most memorable DX encountered:

• A 100 watt station in Namibia which was just booming in a couple of times during the contest.
• Working a loud VK3 station long-path on Sunday afternoon.
• Pulling an S0 signal out of the South Cook Islands Saturday evening on 10m.
• Getting a VK7 station on 80m at sunrise, Sunday morning

However, those high points aside, this contest did nothing to improve my impression of phone contests.  Granted, the DX feels a little more real when there’s a voice on the other end of the contact, rather than just a set of dits, dahs, and/or diddles, but that added fun is offset by overlapping signals and just general QRM.

You can tell that I suffered by just how much lower the score is on the phone side as compared to the CW test:

          CW           SSB
Band   Q's   DX     Q's   DX
 1.8     1    1       3    3
 3.5   110   44      51   36
   7   142   52      69   42
  14   341   81     119   66
  21   222   82     140   55
  28    46   28      76   37
TOTAL  862  288     458  239

SCORE   744,768      328,386

Perversely, there’s a chance that the SSB score will rank high enough to get published in QST, while the CW will be buried deep in the line scores on the ARRL website.   That’s because the entry for the phone test is being made as a multi/single-low power…a category that doesn’t attract too many entrants.

NAQP RTTY Report

Yes, this is late, but I got tied up with work.   The downside of having so much fun on the radio is that I don’t have as much time to write as I once did.   Considering the reports on how much traffic passes through this site, it’s probable that not many people notice.

Anyway the RTTY installment of the NAQP was a couple of weekends ago.   It combines two things that I enjoy greatly:

• A short contest period (12 hours, of which single-ops may work any 10), which doesn’t cause an entire weekend to be consumed by a serious contest effort; and
• RTTY, which is my favorite contesting mode.

This weekend also marked my first serious use of N1MM for a RTTY contest, thanks to some guidance I had received on how to get the MMTTY engine to talk to the FSK port on my Navigator Interface.    A “COM port in use” error had lead me to use MixW in the past several RTTY tests, an arrangement that has worked very well when the contest exchange is a serial number or state (both of which are automagically captured by MixW), but which might have become cumbersome for the NAQP name exchange.

I don’t currently have a recollection about the bands being significantly better or worse than normal during the contest.  Comparing the results of the RTTY test to the CW or SSB portions hints at some differences, but I suspect that may be due as much to the nature of RTTY (which can be challenging in the higher-noise environment of the low bands) than actual condx.

Results, alongside the CW and SSB installments:

         CW        SSB        RTTY
Band  Q's Sec    Q's Sec    Q's Sec
 1.8   35  21     20  16
 3.5  126  37    100  34     61  29
   7   64  30     45  24     97  40
  14   76  33     52  28    101  33
  21   54  20     75  32     94  30
  28   11   6     28  15     17   9
TOTAL 366 147    320 149    370 141

SCORE  53,802     47,680     52,170

I realize that those scores are not terribly impressive as compared to what the big gun contest stations can achieve, but I had fun, and that’s what counts. 

Diamond DXCC

And to think that a few days ago, I was wondering where I was going to scare up a few more to get to the century mark….today I passed number 100 on the Diamond DXCC list.

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.