Tiny Elephant's Contest Corner

The Latest Contest News -
A NARC Bulletin Exclusive

A monthly column by Ed Deichler, K2TE

Here it is almost the middle of September and I haven't had chance to work any of the contests yet. As a matter of fact, I haven't been on the air in several weeks. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am voluntarily QRT for the next several months - right through the heart of contest season !! Talk about bad timing ! I suppose the only thing worse would be if I had to stop running for a while (Oops - better not say that, hi). Mike, NE1V, and I were looking forward to upgrading the station here for a decent 2-transmitter contest station and give the big contests some serious effort. Since the K2TE "superstation" is temporarily on hold, maybe Mike and I (a.k.a. Mutt and Jeff, or is Jeff and Mutt ?) can work some other superstation as "hired guns".

At any rate, the past month has not been a total loss. I mentioned last month that I was frantically trying to get my PK232 to behave itself and play with the WF1B RTTY contest program. My objective was to play with the contest program during the SARTG RTTY contest that is held in late August so that I could get comfortable with it before the CQ Worldwide RTTY contest at the end of September. I did manage to get hardware and software "natural enemies" to coexist in peace (i.e., it worked) thanks largely to Mike, NE1V.

The strange thing about all this is that I had gotten things to work weeks before the contest and I thought I had written down exactly what I did. Without going into details on what is by now a familiar "software-hostile" horror story, I found out that the recommended procedure in the WF1B manual for working with a PK232 leaves a lot to be desired. True, the published procedure will get you into the command prompt ("cmd:") mode, but it will not let you send or use any of the transmit buffers. The problem, as Mike discovered, was that the baud rate for the TNC that gets set in the contest start-up window should be left alone at the default 1200. It seemed quite natural to me that I should select 9600 baud to match the PK232 as I went through the setup procedure. By leaving the baud rate alone and entering the contest window, I then turn on the PK232 and it prompts me for an asterisk so that it can automatically sync to the TNC. Once this is done, everything works fine.

Why mention this? A lot of hams use PK232s for the digital modes. I feel it is not nice to have my blood pressure approaching Route 3 Friday afternoon levels simply because the manual does not reflect what the program wants you to do.

While I may not be able to get on the air, I am not without ham projects to do (no surprise). I managed to get my long-awaited Beverage antenna strung through the woods a few days ago. The antenna is abut 600 feet long and averages 10 feet about ground level, running to the Northwest. I still need to terminate it and install a matching transformer so that the receiver will be happy with it. If all goes well, I will finally hear those stations from the Far East that are always spotted early in the morning on 80 and 160 meters by guys with wires everywhere. Based on the contests scheduled for October, I should have plenty of opportunity to see how it works. (Sure beats raking leaves !)

RSGB 21/28 MHz Contest. 1 October (phone), 15 October (CW).

The Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) sponsors separate phone and CW contests as a British DX contest. The contests focus on 10 and 15 meters because most British stations only have room for a small, usually unguyed, tower that is optimum for these bands. The contest provides a good status check on 10-meter propagation for the CQ Worldwide contest later in the month. Times for both contests are 0700 to 1900Z. The exchange is signal report and a serial number for us, plus 3-letter county code for UK stations. Each QSO counts as 3 points, with the final score determined as QSO points x county codes worked/band. Logs go to G3UFY.

VK/ZL/Oceania Contest. 7-8 October(phone), 14-15 October (CW).

Leapfrogging the RSGB contest is one from the Pacific that covers 160 through 10 meters on two separate weekends. Both contests are for 24 hours starting at 1000Z on first day for each contest. Operating categories are single operator, either all band or single band, and multioperator. Exchange is a signal report and serial number. Scoring favors the low bands, with a whopping 20 points/QSO for 160 meters, 10 points/QSO on 80 meters, and 5 points on 40 meters, followed by 1, 2, and 3 points for 20, 15, and 10 meters, respectively. Multipliers are the number of prefixes worked per band x QSO points. All logs for the phone contest go to VK3APN; phone logs by November 17, and CW logs by November 24.

CQ Worldwide SSB DX Contest. 28-29 October.

Holding down its traditional last weekend in October, the CQ Worldwide SSB DX contest is a 48-hour megacontest that covers the whole world. The basic rule of the contest is that everyone works everyone else in the world (except his own country) on 160 through 10 meters. The exchange is a signal report and CQ Zone number (zone 5 for us up here). Several categories and power classes are available so that you can take your pick based on where you feel most competitive or comfortable. For example, the single operator category can be all-band, single-band, or assisted (that is, use packet spotting) and operate high power, low power (100 W or less) or even QRP (< 5 W) for a real challenge (unless your an A51 station). The serious "big guns" can operate as multi- single or multi-multi. Multi-single stations must observe a 10-minute rule whereby only one transmitter is permitted on a band during any 10-minute period. However, a separate "multiplier hunter" transmitter can be used on any other band just to work new multipliers. Scoring: 2 points/QSO with countries on same continent, 3 points/QSO for countries on different continents. Final score: QSO points x (CQ Zones (40 total) + countries worked). Logs for the contest go to CQ Magazine by 1 December.

California QSO Party. 7-8 October. Tennessee QSO Party. 8-9 October. Pennsylvania QSO Party. 15 October. Illinois QSO Party. 22-23 October. Texas QSO Party. 21-22 October.

In case you feel intimidated by the DX contests, there are a slew of stateside QSO parties to practice with during the month. If you're interested in county hunting like I was for many years, the counties in the list above total nearly a fifth of all the counties in the country. What makes these contests fun is looking for stations operating mobile since they usually park on county lines and give two or more at one time.