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It seems that I’ve been doing more RTTY contesting lately, and on Saturday, I spent about 8 1/2 hours participating in the SCC (Slovenia Contest Club) RTTY Championship contest. This was a 24 hour contest, running from 8AM Saturday to 8AM Sunday (local time), and it’s one of the contests where anybody can work anybody. I like those, because even if propagation isn’t cooperating, I can usually work someone in the US. This is a good thing, because propagation wasn’t all that great, and as it turns out, just about 50% of my contacts were with US stations.

There are some interesting scoring rules in this contest that I haven’t seen before. In many DX contests, you get more points for working DX which favors certain parts of the world where there are literally dozens of countries in an area the size of the US. However, for this contest the rules are set up so that within “big” counties (like the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Argentina, and others) you get extra points for working stations within that country but who are in different call areas, provinces, or oblasts. I wish that some of the other DX contests would use this system which seems to level the playing field a bit. One other scoring rule that is fun is that the multipliers are the year that you were first licensed. I worked a few stations who were first licensed in 2010 (all of which were, I believe, specially issued callsigns), but it was fun working stations who were licensed in the 1940s and even in the 1930s. I worked a couple of stations who were licensed in the 40s, but both of them turned out to be using club callsigns, which of course were issued when the club was originally founded. (Still quite impressive to be sure). The oldest non-club call that I worked was Charles, W0HW, who was first licensed in 1937. According to the information on qrz.com, he was born in 1922, so Charles, who is now 88 (and obviously still active on the air) got his first license at age 15. I’m sure he’s got a lot of interesting stories to tell.

As with a lot of my contesting, I tend to fit it into the “space available” on a weekend. For this contest, I didn’t get started until around 3:30PM (local time), at which point I configured my contest logging program for this contest and got on the air. I listened briefly on 15m but since I only heard one very weak signal, I decided to start off on 20m. For about the first half hour, I ran in Search & Pounce (S&P) mode, working just under 20 stations. As I was tuning, I found an open frequency right at the lower end of the 20m RTTY sub-band (14.084Mhz), and I figured that I’d try to see if I could switch to Run mode. As I’ve mentioned previously, being able to run stations really improves you rate and it’s also a lot more fun. It’s usually difficult for a low-power station like mine to hold a run frequency for long (because usually a higher-power station will just sort of take over, despite the fact that it’s poor operating practice, at best, so do so; it’s arguably illegal as well), but I was thrilled to be able to stay on that same frequency for around 4 hours. I can’t say that I had huge numbers of stations calling me the entire time, but there were periods where I was working about 2 stations per minute continuously for several minutes. For this contest, it seems that 2 per minute was about the maximum achievable because the rate of information exchanged is fixed (a characteristic of RTTY), and the amount of information that had to be exchanged was of a certain length. Unlike a CW or Phone contest, you simply can’t go much faster. (Yes, there are some shortcuts, but they don’t make that much difference, especially when you don’t have a continuous pileup.) I was very pleased to be able to continue my run for that amount of time.

I took a break and went out to dinner with Sharon (who, as usual, was being very understanding about the contest), and got back to the radio at around 9:30PM, worked a few stations on 20m, then moved down to 40m. The conditions on 40m seemed to be surprisingly good, and I was able to work a good number of European stations first running S&P and then later when I had a run frequency. (That run wasn’t nearly as good as the 20m run, but it was still quite productive). After a while, I seemed to have run out of stations on 40m, so I moved down to 80m to see what I could find. During the summer, 80m isn’t great for DX because it’s noisy due to the thunderstorms that are common during that time of the year. After a while, including a period where I had a rather unsuccessful attempt and running station (plenty of frequencies were available, but apparently nobody could hear me), I moved back to 40m again. Somewhat to my surprise, the propagation had improved, and by that time, some of the early-risers in Europe were awake to work the night-owls in North America. (It was around 1AM at that point.) I continued to work stations on 40m, but at 2AM, I finally threw in the towel and finished up with 207 (non-duplicate) QSOs in the log. As it turns out, I was up for over an hour after that acting as the family “IT guy”, fixing a problem with Sharon’s BlackBerry. Needless to say, I didn’t get up early enough to put a few more QSOs in the log the next morning, so that was my final total.

Here’s my detailed score summary for the contest:

Band    QSOs    Pts  Sec
 3.5      29      57   25
   7      67     168   42
  14     111     268   50

Total     207     493  117

            Score : 57,681
    

This was my first effort in this contest, so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but I was very happy with the results.

While most of you reading this are hams, I have a number of readers who aren’t and who probably haven’t heard what things sound like on the radio. There are also some hams who aren’t active on the HF bands for any number of reasons who might not have had an opportunity to listen to DX. DX, meaning “distance”, is what hams use to refer to a “far away” contact. The definition of “DX” varies, but in this case I’m talking about a contact with a ham in a foreign country. What I’d like to do is present a short (42 second) clip of a DX station and explain what’s being heard.

First, I’ll note that what you’ll hear is typical of a DX station making brief contacts. There’s not a lot of chat back and forth, but the goal here is to make as many contacts as possible. Second, I picked this clip (recorded earlier today) because the station I was listening to happened to have an exceptionally strong signal and conditions were very good. (For those of you interested, the DX station was using a 2KW amplifier into a 6 element cubical quad. My station is an Icom 756 Pro II with a G5RV antenna up about 10 m in the backyard. I worked him a few minutes before this recording was made.)

With that said, here’s the link to the audio file that I’ll be describing: http://k2dbk.com/rl3a.mp3 (you may need to right-click and save that to your computer, or you may just be able to click on it to play, depending on how your computer is set up.)

I’ll give a start time in seconds for each description to help you follow along, here’s what you’re hearing:

:00 – “Q R Zed stateside, Radio LimaThree Alpha” – QRZ (hams pronounce the letter “Z” like “Zed” because it’s so similar to other letters like C, etc.) is a sort of shorthand for “Who is calling me?”. He uses the term “stateside” because he’s just interested in making contacts with stations in the United States (though often that really includes Canada and Mexico as well.)  Radio Lima Three Alpha are the radio phonetics for the callsign RL3A, who is the DX station that I referred to earlier. I’ll explain more about him later, but what’s happening here is that he’s saying “This is RL3A and I’m ready for another contact”.

:03 – At this point various stations are giving their callsigns phonetically (kind of like kids raising their hands in class and saying “pick me, pick me!”). Because of the way radio propagation works, you can’t hear everyone calling him, but you can hear Whiskey Alpha Eight Lima Oscar Whiskey (WA8LOW) along with what sounds like a bunch of other people calling all at once. (In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening).

:07 – “Victor Echo United, what’s the prefix?” Although we heard WA8LOW, RL3A has heard part of a callsign that ends in VUE and he’s asking for the beginning of it.

:10 – First a bit of just noise, then “Roger, roger, Victor Echo Three Victor Echo United fifty-nine, QSL?” The noise (most of which I’ve edited out) is where VE3VEU is giving his complete callsign to RL3A. The reason you can’t hear VE3VEU is because of propagation. That’s a station in Canada and his signal is probably passing right over me, but was mostly likely very strong as heard by RL3A. RL3A acknowledges that he’s heard the complete callsign and gives him a standard signal report, 59. The report is given using the RST (Readability, Signal, Tone) system, but in many cases a simple 59 report is used where the exact value of the report isn’t important. QSL is a shorthand way of saying “Did you get the information that I sent you?”

:16 – More noise while VE3VUE is talking, then at about :21 “Seventy Three Bill, good luck Q R Zed Radio Lima Three Alpha” Seventy-Three (73) is another ham radio “code” which means “best regards” and is a common way to say “so long” at the end of a contact. If you’ve been keeping track, you’ve figured out that the next part is RL3A asking “who wants to be next?”

:25 – More stations calling, then “Whiskey Delta Eight Japan Papa something fifty-nine, over”. This is pretty much the same as the previous contact, but in this case RL3A sent the 59 signal report right away. He’s got most of WD8JP’s call but thinks he might be missing a letter. “Over”, as you might expect, just means that he’s telling the other station to go ahead and talk.

:34 – I cut quite a bit of the noise out here since it was rather long, and then we hear “QSL John, I am Dima, Delta Italy Mike Alpha and the QTH Moscow. Thank you John for the QSO 73 good luck”.  In this case, RL3A is using QSL to acknowledge that he has heard the information sent (it can be used either as a question, as in the clip started at :10, or as an answer). Obviously the WD8 station operator has said his name is John (and it turns out that the complete station call was in fact WD8JP, that’s why RL3A didn’t respond with the full callsign again, since he had received it correctly the first time), and RL3A’s name is Dima, which he spells phonetically. You have probably guessed that QTH is a shorthand for “location”, and Dima is located in Moscow. He then closes out the contact with the usual “so long” and after that (though not recorded), he repeated the “loop” of working stations.

I hope you’ve found this informative, if a bit lengthy. If for some reason you have a problem downloading the MP3 file (it’s a bit over 500k bytes in size), please let me know and I’ll help you out.

I operated a contest yesterday that I’d only ever done before as as DX, The RSGB IOTA contest. In this contest, any station can work any other station, but if you work an island (as defined by the organizers [note that the link goes to a PDF file]) it is worth more points (15, instead of 3 for a non-island contact) and each island you work counts as a multiplier, increasing your score. The contest has some interesting rules regarding hours of operations (you can submit as a “12 hour” or “24 hour” contestant) and some categories that are different from many other contests. (e.g., “Island DXpedition”). I decided that I’d try to operate in the 12-hour, low-power assisted  mixed category as “world” station. That means that my operating time was 12 hours or less, I used 100 watts to transmit, I used the packet cluster to help locate stations, operated both phone and CW, and I was not located on a island.

Unlike many other contests which typically start either in the evening or mid-afternoon for me, this one started at 8AM local (Eastern Daylight Time), and, not being a “morning person”, I didn’t get on the air until around 11:30 AM, and was a little disappointed to find out that the band conditions didn’t seem to be as good as I’d hoped. I started off on 20m phone and made a handful of contacts in the first 20 minutes. I realized that if 15m was open, if I wanted to work anyone outside the US it would have to be early in the afternoon. I switched over to 15m and found … nothing. Well, almost nothing. I did manage to work two stations in about 10 minutes, one on phone and one on CW. Clearly 15m was not going to be a productive band.

I moved back to 20m and worked stations steadily, thought not terribly quickly using Search & Pounce to find stations. I worked a few dozen stations on phone, then another dozen or so on CW and moved back to phone. After another hour of S&P, I was lucky enough to find a clear frequency to call CQ to try to “run” stations. (During most contests, it’s pretty tough to find and keep a frequency, especially for a small station like mine.) I called CQ for a couple of minutes and got one reply from a station in Poland, then about a minute later got a reply from my friend David, K2DSL, who is located nearby. We chatted briefly, then I moved on to work other stations. All of a sudden, a number of stations all started calling me. It turned out that David had “spotted” me on the packet cluster. When that happens many stations will tune to the spot frequency to work whoever is there. For someone like me being spotted is terrific because it significantly increases the rate at which  I can work stations. Prior to being spotted, I’d operated for around 4 hours and had made around 100 contacts, for a rate of around 25/hr. One hour after being spotted I’d worked an additional 65 stations, almost tripling my rate. I finally gave up the frequency after about 90 minutes, making 75 QSOs during that time which comes to around 50/hr. (The final 20 minutes or so of that period was considerably slower). In any case I had a great time and it was a lot of fun being the person that was being called, rather than having to hunt.

After time out for dinner (we were out with friends), I got back on the air at around 11:30PM. The only band that was open at the time was 40m, and because of atmospheric noise due to all the thunderstorms in and around the east coast, the band was very noisy. It was very slow going making contacts, and I suspect that some of the ones that I made then will turn out to be incorrect, since I had a particularly difficult time getting the details of the contest exchange. (For this contest, you gave a serial number, starting at one, and, if located on an island, the island identifier). I gave up after about 90 minutes, with a total of 210 contacts in my log. I thought that it was a pretty decent effort for the seven hours that I operated. Here’s my score summary:

        Band  Mode  QSOs     Pts  Sec
           7  CW      10     138    9
           7  LSB     22     246   13
          14  CW      45     399   13
          14  USB    130     990   27
          21  CW       2      18    1
          21  USB      1       3    0
       Total  Both   210    1794   63

            Score : 113,022

Earlier today, fellow blogger and Cornbread Road podcaster Jeff, KE9V posted an article on his blog entitled “Screw You Newington“. Please take a minute to read that if you haven’t already.


While I don’t entirely agree with Jeff’s comments (and I commented there saying so), I do feel that the ARRL has possibly made a serious mistake in the way they’ve gone about starting up their presence on Facebook. As I promised Jeff, I’ve written an email to my ARRL Division Director (Frank, N2FF) and Vice- Directory (Joyce, KA2ANF) explaining my concerns. I have slightly edited what I wrote to them (removing some personal things) and I am posting it here, sort of as an “open letter”. Unless they explicitly give permission, I won’t be posting their response, but I felt that posting this would give my view of things.

Hi Frank and Joyce,

I hope you’ve been keeping cool and the DX has been flowing for you.

Recently, the ARRL posted an article on their website about their presence on Facebook. In general, I think this is an excellent idea, as social media, like it or not, is here to stay and is an important part of having public visibility. I think it’s a great way to show that the ARRL is active and recognizes that things like Facebook have value to many people. A Facebook presence should help the League acquire new members who may not be aware of the fine work that they do.

However, I do have one concern. The following is quoted from the article:

Thanks to Herman May, KE5HYW, the ARRL has its own Facebook page. Check out the page to see a lot of features you won’t find anywhere else, such as pictures from ARRL events and interactive status updates. [emphasis mine]

I have shared with both of you my disappointment in the current ARRL website, but I think that the worst thing that the League can do is to start posting “exclusive” content elsewhere. While I understand that intent is to provide another outlet for content, asking members to visit a second site doesn’t seem to be a good idea to me. If the ARRL wants to keep users coming back to their website (which is typically the goal of any website), the exclusive content should be there, and there alone. I think it’s perfectly fine to have some overlap between the sites, but the arrl.org website should be the primary site.

I also think that the League will run into issues with members who aren’t willing to join Facebook (they’ve gotten a lot of bad press lately, some of it deserved, some not, for their privacy issues), and I am sure there will be complaints from users who are being “forced” to join Facebook to view the content.

With that said, I have looked at what’s up on Facebook now, and aside from some user-posted pictures, most of the content appear to be cross-posted from the ARRL news feed along with minimal status updates like today’s “Who did you have your first QSO with”? If that’s really the main thrust of what’s going to be available there, then perhaps this isn’t really a significant issue, but I am aware of several fellow hams who are taking the information published in the article at face value and assume they’ll be missing out on something if they don’t join Facebook.

In closing, I hope that you take this note in the spirit in which it’s intended, which is to provide constructive criticism of something that I think the ARRL could be doing better.

As I mentioned previously, Ed, VP9GE helped me to get a license to operate from Bermuda (VP9) for my vacation last week. Since this was all pretty last minute, the exact plans to get on the air were pretty much non-existent, but Ed suggested that I contact him on the repeater when I got down to Bermuda and work out the details that way. I decided to bring along my Icom W32a HT (a full-featured 5w transceiver) as well as my little Icom Q7a HT, which is very small, runs off two AA batteries, but only puts out 500mw (1/2 w).  I haven’t used the W32a much recently, and although I’ve tried to keep the batteries (I have 2 battery packs, one stop and one an extended capacity version) topped off, I think they may have simply reached the end of their life and don’t seem to hold a charge very well. Still, I figured that I might be able to get enough power out of them to make contact with Ed.

I didn’t mention previously that we were taking a cruise to Bermuda, and because of the location of the ship (we were docked in “Dockyard” it was very difficult to reliably hit the repeater. The first day there, we decided to take the high-speed ferry to Hamilton (the capital city) and I took the small Q7a with me, hoping that there would be good-enough coverage there. As it turns out, that did work out quite well, and I was able to contact Ed via the repeater, using my K2DBK/VP9 callsign. Ed is constantly running around (he runs some guest apartments on the island) and had a number of runs to the airport and meetings over the next couple of days, but we agreed to try to contact each other again at around noon the next day.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in to the repeater the next day, as we were doing some sightseeing in St. Georges, and apparently the repeater doesn’t have good enough coverage there to pick up my little 1/2 watt signal. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was close enough that I could have worked Ed simplex, but I never tried.

So although I did manage to operate at least once as K2DBK/VP9, I wasn’t able to get on HF or 6 meters. Still, it was fun doing that, and if I ever get back to Bermuda, I’ll try to plan a bit more in advance and hopefully get on the lower bands.

Sharon & I spent last weekend visiting my friends Larry, N4VA, and Coleman, K4RZ who live in Virginia. Last year we visited them during the same weekend and I went with Larry & Coleman to W3LPL’s open house, which I wrote about when first attended in 2005. Sharon came with me last year as well and she visited with some friends who lived in the area while we visited the big aluminum farm. This trip has become an annual thing for us, and what happens is that I take off the day from work on Friday and drive down, arriving (hopefully) just before rush hour hits the DC area. We have a great barbecue dinner with some friends (mostly non-hams but also with Fred, K3ZO, who is fairly well-known in ham circles), go to W3LPL’s Saturday and head home Sunday, with the space in between (when not eating or otherwise having a great time) gets filled with “playing radio”, propagation permitting.

When we arrived on Friday, 6 meters was cooperating, and literally just as I walked in Larry had picked up Dennis, 5J0BV who was operating from San Andres Island (which is located to the east of Nicaragua but considered to be a “department” of Columbia). Dennis had a good signal but when I tried to work him with Larry’s paddle, I had a really tough time sending my callsign correctly. I make no secret of the fact that I normally send “computer assisted” CW from a keyboard, but given that I’d just gotten out of the car from the 5 hour drive, I was having a really tough time trying to use the paddles. (By the way, I’ll say that I had no trouble decoding what Dennis was sending by ear, I just could not get my fingers to cooperate.) Larry finally gave me a bit of an assist, and I was able to count this as a “new one” on 6 meters. Very shortly thereafter, Dennis switched to sideband and I was easily able to complete a contact there as well, even having a bit of time to chat and apologizing for the mess I’d made with the CW contact.

After  dinner 6 meters continued to be open to the west, and I had a good time watching Larry pick up a bunch of new grid squares. Grid squares, like “countries” can be used to earn credit towards certain operating awards, the most popular being VUCC for grid squares and DXCC for countries. For both of these awards there are rules about where you have to be to gain credit, and those rules say that while you can get credit for any DXCC entity while working anywhere within the same entity/country (in other words, I can get DXCC credit regardless of where in the US I’m located), for the VUCC award you can only count new grids that you work from your home grid. (There is actually a little leeway, I’ll leave reading the rules as an exercise for the reader.) As a result, although my contact with 5J0BV counted for DXCC, it, along with the other grids that Larry was working that evening, don’t count for me for the VUCC award.

More to come …

It’s been quite a while since I wrote last, mostly because I didn’t have all that much that I felt was interesting. There were a few bits here and there, but none worth writing about. All of a sudden, I have a lot to write about. 

I’ll start with a couple of relatively quick things here, and try to get another update out in a couple of days with more.

First, I may be on the air at some point next Wednesday, Thursday and/or Friday as K2DBK/VP9 from Bermuda.  I’m going to be there on vacation and while I hadn’t planned on getting on the air, through a series of events I wound up connecting with Ed, VP9GE. If you’ve worked VP9 on 6m, chances are that you’ve worked Ed.  This was all very last minute, but I’m trying to arrange at least an “eyeball QSO” (that’s a face-to-face meeting for any non-hams out there) with Ed while I’m in town, and Ed’s already said that he’s going to try to get me a license to operate from there. I don’t know how much I’ll know before leaving, but hopefully if I make it on the air I’ll get spotted on the packet clusters, and if possible I’ll try to post here, on my page at qrz.com, and even on twitter.com (@k2dbk).


The other quick thing that I wanted to post about was that fellow blogger Jeff, KE9V, has started a new podcast called “Cornbread Road”. As Jeff describes it, it’s a “different kind of podcast”, and here’s what his “About” page says: 

Deep in the Heartland a small group of ham radio enthusiasts enjoy an idyllic existence of wide open spaces, no antenna restrictions, low-noise levels, dark skies, and good fellowship. But things aren’t exactly as they seem on Cornbread Road. Unexplained lights in the night skies, satellite signals masked from the ether, strange late night visitors to this small farming community…
Cornbread Road is a ham radio mystery delivered in tiny audio giblets.

I listened to the first episode during my ride into work this morning and I really enjoyed it.