Spent some time playing in the North American QSO Party (RTTY) doing some casual search and pounce-ing (S&P). Made 90 contacts, including a couple operators in MS and one in RI on two bands. Hopefully they’ll upload to LoTW and I can finish off my WAS(Basic).
Most of my contacts were on 20m, and went down to 40m towards the late evening. 54 contacts on 20m and 36 contacts on 40m. The N1MM logger tells me that my contacts were worth 4410 points.
Now that I’ve got another digimode contest under my belt, I think that when it comes to contesting, I think I prefer SSB over digital. The digital mode contesting just doesn’t seem as challenging or entertaining as SSB is. That probably won’t keep me from entering other digimode contests, but when it comes to deciding which ones to participate in, I’ll probably won’t make as much of an effort to participate in digital contests.
Spent a few hours on the radio this weekend playing in the ARRL RTTY Roundup. It’s my first digimode contest and it was an interesting experience.
I’ve found that with digital modes, I like to have the sound on so that I can hear (in addition to see) the activity in the passband. I started off on 20m and right off encountered a bunch of loud and overdriven signals. Some of the transmissions were so bad that they washed out the entire passband during the transmission. Here’s a brief sample of what some of the better transmissions looked like.
20m RTTY passband during the 2014 ARRL RTTY Roundup
I also found that fldigi’s decoding the RTTY signals seemed to be spottier than PSK decoding. I’m not sure if that was just because of the quality of the transmissions it was having to decode or just the nature of RTTY. I’ll have to try to find some non-contest RTTY to test with.
For most of the contest, I was running 30-35W which seemed to be pretty sufficient to get me heard reasonably far. I finished up with around 110 QSOs and decided to call it a day a few hours before the end of the contest because I was getting tired of sitting.
Highlight of the contest was a 20m contact with VK3TDX all the way in Austrailia. That sets the record for my longest QSO at over 16 000 km. Here’s the excerpt from the fldigi log
There’s some garbled decoding, but it looks like he got everything. Using 35W, I was very surprised he was even able to pick up my signal. I suppose it’s possible he was listening remotely using a station closer to me (with SDR and Internet connected radios, you can listen and potentially operate from anywhere in the world from the comfort of your computer desk). I’ll hang on to the thought that I just had some astoundingly good propagation.
AB4UG-VK3TDX QSO
(Sweet, just checked on LoTW and it’s confirmed there. Woohoo!)
At a couple points toward the end, my sound card interface started acting up and would rapidly switch PTT on and off. Not sure what was causing it, but both times it happened there were some really strong signals coming through the radio. Don’t know if it’s related or not, and this is the only time the interface has acted up like that.
After today, I haven’t quite decided if digimode contests are quite my thing. I think I’ll have to try a few more contests out.
Coming up this weekend (Aug 18) is the ARRL Rookie Roundup (RTTY) which I’m planning on participating in. Like last year, we’ll be using the club’s communications trailer and setting up at the old fire station off Dorchester Road (6938 Dorchester Rd) by the Air Force base.
Not sure who’s call sign we’ll be using yet but hopefully the bands will be in decent shape and we’ll be able to make some contacts.
