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During the 2023 Canada Winter contest I had an odd thing happen twice with the Reverse Beacon Network website. But before I go into that let's talk about what I use the Reverse Beacon Network for in contests. This site has a huge amount of stations that just listen for stations calling CQ. If you are heard then you are shown on a world map along with your signal strength to that location. This is a great tool during a contest for me as it shows where and how strong my signal is. I have used this site for years but in the last contest, something happened that never has and it happened twice.

I was calling for some time on 40m CQ contest and I was getting Reverse Beacon Network feedback from my signal. The reporting station MM0ZBH reported me but on 20m? Informing me my signal was 6dB and on 14036 and not 7.030 where I was calling CQ contest this was at 2337UTC.

 Earlier at 2212UTC the same station had reported me again on 20m this time at 14030 when I was calling CQ on 7030 and my signal strength this time was 28dB. This was odd and even more so when it happened twice in the contest. Any ideas out there and has anyone had the same issue happen to them?

MM0ZBH is the 6th station down on the list

Final score

 I am a bit behind with my posting about the Canada Winter contest that happened last weekend. I have been occupied with looking back on 2023 and my New Year's post. As said last weekend was the Canada Winter Contest I took part in the CW-only category and had a blast. The contest covers from 2m to 160m (excluding WARC bands) SSB and CW in which you can do either of both. The conditions were great in this part of the world and the bands were busy with contesters. I called CQ contest (running) for over 90% of the contest which helped me greatly to improve on working pileups. 

Some of the contact highlights were contact into the Yukon, South Africa and Australia. My average QSO's per hour was 66 and my highest was 90 per hour. The antenna I was using was the Hustler 4BTV (10m-40m) this limited me from 80 and 160 therefore on Friday evening I had to pull the plug at about 0120 UTC as 40m was closing down for me. The contest finished at 2359UTC on Saturday but I was getting tired and pulled the plug at 2330UTC. 

During the day on Friday here in New Brunswick, we did have some freezing rain and that affected some radio ops down this way. Fortunately, I can tilt my antenna over which I did and cleaned the ice off and put it upright again. I did this just before the start of the contest and had no issues. 

I loaded my log in ADIF format into Log Analyzer which gave me a map representation of my contacts. You can see my two distant contacts in South Africa and Australia. This software uses the station's grid square for map location. The issue with this is incorrect grid squares give you some odd results. In my case, the map shows one station in Saudi Arabia and another in the middle of the ocean. Both are a result of an incorrect grid square. But overall the program works great and gives you a nice visual of your contest contacts. The Log Analyzer software does have a workaround for when this happens details are found in a link in red at the top of the website page.

Almost worked all provinces.

The plans for the new year are to start more often to run in the CWops mini contests. This would help my running skills to improve a lot. You can practice running with software all you want but there is nothing like the real thing. The 1 hour CWops mini tests would give me live practice twice a week. 

I would like to move a bit more away from all computer code sending during contests and try to add more of me sending exchanges, repeats and sending the station call with my amazing Begali key. The difficult part for me is switching over to the key and then back to the keyboard to juggle N1MM+ logger. 

Now here is a stretch...in contesting there is what is known as single op 2 radio! You have one radio in one ear and the other radio in the other. I don't know how they do it but then again just over a year ago I just could not understand how op's hear one station in a mess of a pile-up. I practiced and low and behold your ears get used to how to hear a call or part of a call. I digress.....My Icom 7610 has two independent receivers and I believe I could start to practice that and who knows! 

As you all know I am retired and I want to keep up with my daily walks (weather permitting) and my 1 hour of stretching that I do each day. I never want to forget how important our health and well-being is.
Well, that's about it for the plans for 2024 but no rule says I can't build and add to the goals I have.

As 2023 is on the eve of ending it has been a great year of retirement I can't believe I am heading into year 5. I am so thankful that my wife and I have had great health during the year.  

 As for my goals for 2023, some moved forward and others did not even start. At the start of 2023, I wanted to look into vinyl albums, a turn table and spin some jazz music...well that never happened. Life just seemed to get in the way of that one. My aspirations of getting a firm hold on CW head copy did not advance as far along as I would like but I am moving forward. At least I am heading in the right direction. 

I am happy to say that my reading has picked up and I have devoted an hour a day which I have been very faithful to. I have been reading fiction, Amateur radio periodicals and technical articles. I also wanted to improve on my ability to handle a pileup during contesting and I have improved with that. I have been using N1MM+ and G4FON software as they both can simulate a CW pileup situation. Finally, my CW speed has improved along with my accuracy. So overall not a bad year regarding goals completed. 

There was a "whisper goal" ( a goal that a little voice whispers in my head) to finally run in the CWops mini tests I do each week. Well, that time was this past week, the mini-contests I choose to take part in are on Wednesdays each week at 1300 and 1900 UTC. The speeds in these mini-tests can get blurry at times. The ops are top level and to be honest, running in an hour contest such as this to me is intimidating, to say the least. During the morning contest, I ran for the last 15 minutes. For the afternoon mini-contest, I ran for just about the full hour. It was bumpy at times and my nerves got the best of me but I look forward in 2024 to make this a common theme in these contests. 

I have been active with CW contesting, contacting POTA and making it into some DXpeditions. Below is my CW count for the year and it's not all about the numbers it's about having fun and that I did! They are almost double from last year. I was reading KE9V blog (as I do each day) and he was saying in a recent post
 "Those who put 10k or more in the log annually aren’t “regular” hams and need a puppy or something to distract them from radio…"
Maybe in my next post of New Year's goals and dreams, a puppy may be in the picture.

 
Thanks to everyone who reads my posts and at times puts up with the dry spells in the posting.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all who have stopped by and visited the blog. 

 The weather here for the weekend was not too great so why not spend some time on the radio? I found the Croatian 9A DX contest to take part in. The solar forecast was not promising but I thought why not spend a few hours on the radio on Saturday and see what happens? Turns out the contest was busy and I managed to practice my CW contesting.  

Below are the results:

This past weekend was the running of the ARRL 10m contest for both CW and SSB. We are in a very nice time in the solar cycle which makes the 10m contest a popular one. The weekend solar conditions were great with the Kp index floating between Kp0 and Kp1. With good solar weather meaning an active sun also comes solar storms with very high Kp index and poor conditions but this weekend was great. As always here at VE9KK I was CW only entry in the contest. Compared to last year's contest I noticed the window into Europe in the mornings did not last that long this year. I did notice more of a window opened in the afternoon toward South America. 

I heard no what might be called exotic DX at my end and most of my scoring was contacting U.S. stations. Due to the propagation of 10m here, I was on the radio at about 7 am local time and off at 5 pm. I found that after 5 pm signals were just not reliable, with many repeats and then the station would just fall off the face of the spectrum. I had a few stations contact me from the Netherlands including Bas PE4BAS a fellow blogger. We did talk a week before the contest about trying to touch base in the contest but you never know. 

I have a program called log analyzer in which you load your contest log in ADIF format (other formats are supported). The program gives you a world map of all your contacts, there are many options the program offers. I do find that if a station you contacted in the contest has an incorrect grid square then you may see an odd country you contacted. For me, the contest showed a U.S. station that was in Saudi Arabia. It was due to his incorrect grid square but that only happens very seldom. 

In this contest my best 1 hour of running was 100 contacts but most of the time it averaged in around 45-70. I did very little searching and pouncing or S&P as it is called. I enter the contest as unassisted meaning I do not use any spotting software. I do this as it gives me more of a challenge. If I entered the assisted category I would have call signs listed on the waterfall of N1MM+ contest software. I could mouse-click from one call to the next and bang off contacts and points. Also, I could see multipliers as well this way. As for me I have fun unassisted and call CQ contest and S&P the waterfall. Below are the results of this year's ARRL 10m contest. Oh and before I go I did have Murphy visit me during this contest or maybe it was just plain old age. I all of a sudden lost mouse control. No matter what I did there was no movement. I ended up restarting my PC which during a contest is a major deal. Once restarted my old age moment passed and I realized I had mouse control again. It was due to the fact I was using the mouse on the left of my desk before the restart and that is the mouse for my Linux PC!!! On the right side of my desk is my Windows mouse and I did not even realize I was using my left-hand side mouse. No restart was needed in the end after all.