Contest Highlights WPX RTTY 2011
The CQ WPX RTTY contest of 2011 is over. It was an interesting contest. Conditions from here in North Carolina were not bad at all,
well over 300 QSO's worked on 3 bands, top band was the half square on 40m with 347 QSO's, 15m was next with 331, and 20m with 327 QSO's.
Ten meters left a lot to be desired, the few QSO's made were strong. 18 QSO's with mostly South American with a few W6's and W7's thrown in.
80m was not as good as 40, 161 QSOs on 80m. High point was when B3C was worked from China on 20m. Very strong signals from Asia on Saturday.
This is the perfect contest. For single op stations you are only allowed to work 30 hours out of the 48, so you have 18 hours over the course of the contest that you must sit out.
This programmed rest time was most appreciated. Activity levels were high as compared to the last time I worked the WPX in 2009. Only 770 QSO's and much less than 1 million points.
The amplifier did an outstanding job through the course of the contest. Ran the AL-1500 at 1000w for most of the operations. The 8877 ran cool at these power levels.
The impressive component was the half square antenna on 40 meters. For the second straight time this simple mono-band antenna was the QSO leading band. Moved the antenna from the original position to more north-northeast and south southwest, it really performs well. Added a large coaxial choke at the feedpoint of the half square.
the antenna is about 31 feet high, the vertical lower ends are at ground level. It is about 120 feet from the shack out to the antenna.
Next week, the ARRL International DX CW Contest, 48 hours of fun. See you there!
One person called ham radio contesting "the worlds biggest video game", well that
sort of sums it up, but there is a lot more to it than that. There is a lot of strategy involved, what bands
to operate, when to operate, S&P or Run mode? When to do what makes up a large part of a stations successes
and failures. Here I hope to place some info I have gleaned from the few short years I have been an active
contester. Most of this info was earned via pure common sense.
TIPS
When sending the report
give a 59, or 599. The exchange is the heart of the contest QSO. When you give a 579 you just throw off the
rythym of the other guy.
End your CQ with TEST or CQ, When you send K, and a station just comes across you,
he does not know if you are calling CQ or in a QSO.
I managed to win NC in last years ARRL 10m contest.
As the name implies, contesting is a contest. When I work stations on RTTY for instance
and they begin a contact with "YOUR REPORT IS AS FOLLOWS..." or "PLEASE COPY 599 IN CQ ZONE
ZERO FOUR ZERO FOUR" it makes my skin crawl. Laugh if you like, but I have seen these kinds of reports
in almost every contest I have been in. While there may be some debate on the issue of speed, I feel it is in
your best long term interest to send your exchange 2 quick times. Due to the QRM and QSB on the bands, I think
the time lost sending 2 to 4 digits one extra time is GAINED in not having to re-send anything. Some of the die
hard contesters who barely send anything at all in the interest of speed, usually end of re-sending those
trimmed down reports many times during the course of a contest.
TELEPATHY
I say telepathy
for those fellows who just "know" you are hearing their signal. You know the ones, they answer your
CQ like this, "W1ABC de N0XYZ 599 04 04 BK" First of all for me this breaks your rythmn, and to me
rythmn is everything. Don't be obnoxious, send your call, get a response and send your exchange.
I was the contenintal leader for North American, I of course won El Salvador and I still hold
the record for the ARRL 10 meter contest from that DX entity, my callsign was (and still is) YS1XS. This experience
shows that a "super station" is not needed to place high in a contest, my 1996 ARRL 10 meter station
consisted of the following:
Yaesu FT-890/AT
Ameritron AL80A /internal QSK board
Cushcraft R5 /
roofmounted
QTH was about 2500 feet ASL
Software
Well as far as I am concerned there is only
one contest logger, N1MM has the best contest logger out there. Its great, it's like it has a mind of it's own, with the DX cluster and a PC connection to your rig, it's wild. You tune to a frequency and it "assumes" the callsign of the station based on the cluster data and it's usually correct! It displays a running total on your score and shows the total number of QSO's and mulitpliers as you go, the log is easily exported in ADIF format for importing to you Winlog32, (is there anything else??) Usually after a contest, it takes me less than 5 minutes to export my final log for submission, export and import the contest QSO's into Winlog, and then upload the ADIF file to Eqsl, and create and upload my .tq8 file to Logbook of the World, 5 minutes is being generous, usually it's a lot less than that! It seems to me that a very high percentage of contesting hams use Logbook of the World, and one big part of the fun is watching the QSL's come pouring in, last week when I finally worked the last 3 states I needed for WAS on RTTY and saw that all three were LOTW users, I knew it was in the bag, on Sunday night less than 1 hour after the contest ended, I had WAS on RTTY and I never licked a single stamp. You gotta love it! N1MM has a fantastic digital window that uses the MMTTY engine for RTTY, it's great, plenty of easy-to-write macros that make RTTY contesting a breeze. I personally prefer RTTY contest to all of them, and N1MM (along with a FL-100) has made
my RTTY contesting a lot more enjoyable,