Contesting – Page 13 – AB4UG Radioblog

Field Day 2013 Part 1

Had a most excellent time at Field Day yesterday on board the USS Yorktown with CARS. I was put in charge of IT, which meant setting up the two laptops and a little local wifi network so that they could communicate and share a log file.

At 1800UTC (2PM EDT), the chaos the activity started. I spent the first few hours in seek and pounce mode (S&P), tuning around 40m at first and then moving up to 20 and then 15m. Was able to rack up a bunch of contacts, but it wasn’t easy. Thunderstorms to the southwest and in Georgia were causing static crashes because of the lightning. I’d be trying to work some strong stations, then 20-30db of noise would just wipe everything out on the frequency for a second or two. That went on for a few more hours, and then the rest of the evening was relatively clear. Then the problem went back to trying to pick out the Field Day exchange with neighbouring stations or groups of Boy Scouts stomping by behind us drowning everything out (the usual chaos).

I stayed on the Yorktown until around 10ish. A few other club members operated and got some pile ups going. I spent some time hanging out at the CW and digital station, taking photos and helping out with the logging on the phone station.

Field Day on the Yorktown offers a great view of the harbour and the Charleston penninsula while we’re operating.

This is the CW and digital station in action. Last year the CW station was set up in the club communications trailer out on the pier, but didn’t work out so well there, so it was brought up to the ship this time. The digital station was having a similar problem with noisy bands that we were having on the phone station so I don’t think there were too many contacts being made there.

Back for more Field Day fun today until 1800Z (2PM EDT) and then breaking everything down.

If you’re on the air for Field Day today, listen out for WA4USN. It might be me that’s operating!

Field Day!

Another ARRL Field Day is upon us!

ARRL Field Day 2013 logo

Like last year, I’ll be helping out with the CARS Field Day activities over on the Yorktown. Now that I’ve got a little bit more radio experience under my belt, I’ll be able to help out more with the preparations and will enjoy playing with the radios more than last time.

In preparation for Field Day, I’ve been given the task of getting the club laptops ready: installing updates and performing maintenance, updating the logging software (N3FJP), and getting them networked together so that operators at each station can see what’s going on.

TARC will be having their Field Day activities up in Goose Creek at the Marguerite H. Brown Municipal Center.

If you’re in the vicinity of either one of these Field Day locations, stop by and check out the amateur radio operations!

Working on 6m

Well, not only does the radio tune the antenna on 6m/50 MHz, but the radio and antenna seem to work pretty decently.

Spent about 3 hours tuning around on 6m in the Central States VHF Society 6m Sprint contest last night in seek and pounce mode. Tallied up 10 contacts all from grid squares in the northeast plus one in Wisconson. Got some VA3/VE3 stations too. All of them were coming in pretty loud here. I came across several other stations that were just barely audible in the noise. I could hear something there, but not enough to try to work them. Most of the activity I heard was in the lower portion of the 50 MHz band, below 50.3 MHz. I went as high as 50.5 MHz, but didn’t go much higher.

A bit of Googling brought me to this ADIF mapping utility by K2DSL that puts my contacts onto a Google map based on the grid square. It’s kind of neat to see where the signals are coming from.

View Larger Map

I think I’ll add some kind of 6m antenna to the list of Things To Build for the summer. Will be interesting to see if I can make some more distant contacts with a dedicated antenna.

Trying out 6m

Coming up on Saturday is the Central States VHF Society Spring VHF/UHF Sprints. It’s a short 4 hour affair starting at 7PM and ending at 11PM (2300Z-0300Z).

After reading a copy of Six Meters: A Guide to the Magic Band that I found at a used book store, it seemed like it would be a pretty cool band to play on. I usually don’t hear much on 6m during my casual twiddling around on the radio dial. I really don’t know how the antenna performs on 6m aside from the fact that the radio seems to be able to tune it there. Hopefully this will be a chance to find out. Hopefully there will be some good propagation for me on Saturday.

CQ WPX Contesting

Spent some time yesterday and today playing on the radio during the CQ WPX SSB contest. It’s a 48 hour long contest with an exchange of RS(T) and incremental contact number and multipliers for the number of unique prefixes worked.

Instead of using paper logs this time, I installed the N1MM contest logger on the laptop and logged everything there. It conveniently has a list of different contests, including CQ WPX and does all the scoring for you. N1MM is clearly designed to have a connection to the radio to get frequency info, which I don’t have yet so each contact I had to edit the log entry and change the frequency. Slightly inconvenient, but after a while I got used to it.

I spent about 4 hours on the radio Friday night after the contest started (000Z 30-Mar-2013) and didn’t get back to it until this morning. One of the things that I thought was interesting was seeing the contest activity march down the bands as the day went on. Friday night, almost all the activity I heard was on 40m, but this morning, there wasn’t any contest activity that I could hear on 40m. Most of the contest activity was happening on 15m. As the day went on, contest activity on 15m faded away and 20m started becoming more active during the late afternoon hours. Then activity on 40m started picking up during the early evening up until I decided to call it quits around 1930.

Not entirely sure if it’s all related to how band conditions change through the day. There’s a lot about propagation that I’m interested in learning about and I’m pretty sure I was seeing some of that changing propagation through the day.

I worked a total of about 12 hours on and off during the contest and tallied up 82 contacts. It’s the longest stretch of contesting I’ve done so far. Don’t know what my farthest contact was, but I worked a lot of European stations. One of the nice things N1MM does is calculate the contest score for you. Mine came out to 17901 with 81 unique prefixes worked.

It was fun playing in this contest, more so for listening and observing the band activity than the contacts (although that’s always nice). Looking forward to seeing how the overall results look.