 September 16, 2020 Editor: Paul Bourque, N1SFE | |||
IN THIS ISSUE
There's a new weekly "Slow Speed Test" - A slow-speed CW Contest sponsored by the CWops Club. "For those just getting started in CW contesting and others who prefer a more leisurely pace, several members of both the K1USN Radio Club and CWops are starting a weekly one-hour slow speed CW contest, the SST." The inaugural session will be at 0000 UTC September 14 (September 13 evening in the US), and "is designed to encourage and assist those who signed up for the CWops CW Academy to learn CW or to improve their CW skills but are not yet copying 25 WPM, as well as all others who feel like "taking it slow and easy" once per week both for their own pleasure and to help others out." The contest exchange is name + state/province/country, see the rules for suggested frequencies. Entrants are encouraged to post their scores to 3830scores.com One of the first "majors" of the new contest season is the CQ WW DX RTTY Contest, coming up the weekend of September 26. You can be ready for that one by participating in an upcoming RTTYOPS event, or the usual Thursday evening NCCC RTTY Sprints. If you're already RTTY-savvy and want a workout, there's four hours of North American Sprint, RTTY starting 0000 UTC September 20, or the faster BARTG SPRINT75 at 1700 UTC September 20. Five QSO parties and the Wisconsin Parks on the Air event provide opportunities for relaxed contest experiences the weekend of September 19. Note that the Wisconsin event is SSB only on the HF bands. Complete information for all contests follows the Conversation section 17 Sep - 30 Sep 2020 September 17 September 18 September 19
September 20
September 21 September 22 September 23 September 24 September 25 September 26 September 28 September 29 September 30 Well-known contester Jim Brown, K9YC, has been named as the 2020 recipient of the ARRL Technical Service Award. The ARRL Board of Directors noted that "Brown continues to provide his expertise as a means of "giving back" to the amateur community, in the spirit of the amateurs that worked with him when he was first licensed at the age of 13." Jim's technical articles can be found at his website. Jim, K9YC, writes: "NCCC (Northern California Contest Club) has been doing Zoom meetings since COVID first reared its head in March, and response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our circle includes members as far north as Humboldt Co (W6JTI), as far east as Northern NV (K6DGW, K2RD, K5RC and the W7RN station at Tom's QTH, as far south and west as Santa Cruz Co (K6XX, K6GHA, KW6S, K9YC, W6GJB), as far SE as the Sierra (WC6H, WK6I, K6LRN, K6MI), and, of course, the SF Bay area. Over the years, traffic had increased driving time to meetings, even within the Bay area, so that meetings rarely drew more than about 40 members. Zoom meetings are regularly drawing 75-85 members; I'm now regularly seeing guys who I used to see only at Visalia or Pacificon. Rag chewing begins a half hour before the formal meeting and program, often with 20-30 members hanging on for 90-120 minutes after it has adjourned! The same is true of our local club with few contesters. A casual Wednesday lunch gathering typically drew 8-10 hams; on Zoom that number has doubled. - 73, Jim K9YC" The World Wide Radio Operators Foundation (WWROF) is supporting worthy projects oriented towards bring more youth into Amateur Radio through grants. If you know of a project that can help shape the future of Amateur Radio, please encourage those involved to apply via the online grant application form. (K3LR) The Collegiate QSO Party on the weekend of September 19 provides for bonus points for alumni working their alma maters, or an alumnus/alumna working other alumni. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, rules have been relaxed to allow a campus radio station to be operated remotely by college club members, some entry classes have been changed, and scoring has been modified. See the rules for more information. What station won the multi-operator category in the 1969 ARRL November CW Sweepstakes? Now you can find out with CW Sweepstakes QST results article from 1966 to 2019 on the ARRL Contests website. Results for Phone Sweepstakes are also available! Thanks to Trey, N5KO, for scanning these. Data entry for the contest results was done previously by a team led by K5TR and WM5R. (Ward, N0AX)
Enjoy RTTY contesting? Consider Joining the RTTY Operators Facebook group, and the RTTY group on Groups.io. Surrey Amateur Radio Communications is out with the September/October 2020 edition of The Communicator. There's something for everyone in this edition, including an AFSK Transmitter using GnuRadio, a 23cm Antenna, review of songs about ham radio (!?), and more! Scott, N3FJP, writes that his Amateur Contest Log version 6.7 is available on his website. New to this version is the ability to connect up to three radios, improved LOTW functionality, and more. He also notes that his son, Chris, KB3KCN, is taking a much more active role in N3FJP software development. Bone Pile For hams, it's the (sometimes large) accumulated collection of tower sections, complete and partial antennas, cable, and associated materials that are just waiting to be used again. (bonus!) Waffle House Index From Wikipedia: "An informal metric named after the Waffle House restaurant chain and is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery." Ward, N0AX, writes: "Here's a very good photo essay on the history of ZL6QH from its inception to its demise due to the land becoming a wind farm." Remember that time we were all set to ignite our welds for our grounding, but SOMEONE forgot the igniters? Here's how KN2M and N2OMD solved that problem.
Bill, AC0W, NAQP SSB Contest Manager, writes: "The preliminary 2020 NAQP SSB August results are now on the NCJ website." In the preliminary results, NN1C sits atop the Single Operator (LP) scores, while ND0C is atop the QRP pile. The Society of Midwest Contesters SMC Integrated Circuits team currently holds the top team spot. The preliminary results of the August NAQP CW contest are also available on the NCJ website. Certificates for previous NAQPs are available for download. (Chris, KL9A) Raw scores for the 2020 WW Digi DX Contest are available on the WW Digi DX Contest website. Contest sponsors ask that any problems or discrepancies be reported ASAP. Nearly 1700 logs were received, comprising nearly 258,000 contacts, with over 6300 call signs represented. (Ed, W0YK) Tim, K9WX, writes: "The Final Results of the 2020 NAQP Challenge are available! The NAQP Challenge is an annual competition between three of America's premier ham radio contesting clubs: the Northern California Contest Club, the Potomac Valley Radio Club, and the Society of Midwest Contesters. Logs for individual club members who submit a log for any or all of the six North American QSO Parties sponsored each year by the National Contest Journal are automatically included in the NAQP Challenge scoring for their club. Scoring for the Challenge rewards both high participation and high personal scores, which means that both big guns and little pistols can contribute to the success of their club. The results have been tabulated for the August NAQP CW and SSB contests with regard to their contributions to the 2020 NAQP Challenge. The PVRC took first place in both contests and is the overall winner of the 2020 Challenge. PVRC had 151 and 136 participants in the SSB and CW contests, respectively. Their SSB participant number is particularly impressive, 35 more participants than SMC, which took second place in both contests. PVRC also had the highest average log score for each contest. More participants and more points: the unbeatable combination for winning. Which means, for the year, that PVRC wins the Challenge having won 4 out of the 6 rounds while SMC takes second with 2 rounds won (both RTTY contests) and NCCC takes third. This is the second year in a row that PVRC has won the Challenge. Visit the NAQPC web page for more information." Using DSP Filter / Noise Reduction to Copy A Potential Multiplier N4HNH's YouTube video demonstrates how to pull out a DX contest station using a radio's DSP filtering / noise reduction to extract a station from noise. Learning how to do this quickly can put more multipliers in your log under trying conditions. The radio controls he adjusts to recover the signal may be named differently, or differ in implementation for your radio. Ward, N0AX, writes: "Two new items have been uploaded to the ARRL Antenna Book's web page to help with antenna modeling and system design:
Both resources will come in handy to the ham building or maintaining an antenna system." John, VE6EY, blogged about the differences of the front-ends among the various SDR radios that he uses, particularly relating to filtering and gain. His conclusion is that it's essential to know the design of any particular SDR to understand how to optimize the performance in the presence of strong signals. Next time you're working through why you're unable to get networked gear at a remote location working over the internet with the networked gear at your control point, wondering why this is so hard... read this article on NAT traversal, and how many different things can go wrong and the strategies necessary to overcome well-intentioned and otherwise network configurations. Noise.sh is a cloud-based "digital signal processing spreadsheet for sound design." It features concepts of time, beat, generators, samples, and so forth, but in a spreadsheet format. Relationships between cells can be constructed, and selecting a cell plays it. Samples could include audio samples collected over the air. It's an easy way to experiment, and the author is soliciting feedback and bug reports for this early version. The M17 project is an open source digital radio project, akin to DMR, D-STAR, and so on, except fully open source and open standards at all levels. TR-9 is a handheld receiver for M17 that achieved first-boot last week, an important milestone. Mark, K6UFO, thought Contest Update readers would be interested in the Science Daily article "Miniature antenna enables robotic teaming in complex environments" The researchers used a 1/50 wavelength antenna with a "modular active matching network" to obtain a 3-fold increase in the 3 dB bandwidth of the antenna, and a 10 dB improvement in efficiency, compared to a similarly sized unmatched antenna. This article contrasting today's audio recording technology to that of the 1980's is interesting if only for the descriptions of the today's software programs being used to process audio signals. TinySA, a $49 spectrum analyzer, is to Spectrum Analyzers what TinyVNA is to VNAs. According to a reviewer, if input signals are kept in check to avoid overload, it works effectively. NASA has learned what it takes to keep electronics reliable in harsh environments, and you can benefit from their experience. NASA's Inspection Pictorial Reference is "intended to provide insight to certified operators, inspectors and instructors who visually assess the compliance of flight hardware to locally applicable requirements" which includes items that hams use such as coaxial cables and printed circuit boards. An earlier pictorial reference of NASA Workmanship Standards from 2000 provides guidance at the wire and connector level. This project for a single-bit CPU is very specialized, but it's an exemplar for how an open source project can be well documented and supported. The project takes care to refere nce the open source tools used to construct the state and timing diagrams, applicable to many ham radio projects. Graphviz can be used for flowcharts, state diagrams, and so on. Sketchviz has a more human-drawn style. Wavedrom is a tool that can generate timing diagrams that are a pleasure to view.
The next time you need to solder titanium to glass, but don't have the commercial gear on hand to do so, check out this Hackaday article for how to make your own ultrasonic soldering tool, and the solder alloy composition you'll need to join the two materials. The ultrasonic technique combined with active alloy solders can join many metals and metal oxides. The alloy chemistry behind this is relatively new, developed within the last three decades. A New Technique for More Contacts on 10 GHz My October 2020 QST just arrived by USPS, and the article "The Rise of Rain-Scatter Contacts" by Paul, W1GHZ was intriguing. If you've not read it, it describes how signals at 10 GHz are absorbed and then re-radiated by raindrops. The best part is that sometimes these raindrops can be in storm clouds that rise to over 50,000 feet, and that the re-radiated signals are of the same polarization as they were absorbed. They're analogous to taller versions of the mountains that hams use in the west to make reflective contacts. Out here, with mountains, hams coordinate by saying that things like "I'll be just north of Vancouver, BC, and pointing towards Mt. Baker." It works, because it's possible to know where the transmitting station is, where you are, and where Mt. Baker is. Mt. Baker generally doesn't move and it's practical to bounce signals off of it with a reasonable chance of someone else being able to receive those signals. Fifty thousand foot raindrop-containing clouds enabled hams to make contacts exceeding 500 kilometers during the 2019 ARRL 10 GHz and up contest. This defied "conventional wisdom" that mountaintop sites were needed for point-to-point contacts, or mountain reflectors were needed to make 10 GHz contacts. Finding appropriate clouds and figuring the paths using dynamic weather information was the limiting step. That is, until Andy, K0SM, had the inspiration and motivation to create a website that uses real-time weather information to track these moving monster signal re-radiators and display that information in a way that two stations can see a storm's footprint for 10 GHz contacts at any particular time. Www.rainscatter.com was born, and anyone can sign up for an account and start exploring potential paths to make contacts, depending on the weather, of course. Since the site is in "beta" the functionality and user interface are subject to change. But the built-in help system already describes in detail how to view the displayed map to locate storms, view other stations that have self-located on the map, and determine if there's a path. Pointing the antenna, choosing an elevation, contacting the other operator to make sure that they're listening in the right direction, and making the contact are steps that all require an operator, today. The best mode for this operating style is CW due to Doppler shifting (the clouds are moving) and frequency scattering, though FM can also work under good conditions. The availability and use of this website by stations that have 10 GHz gear should make that band more productive during contests. It might also provide the impetus and opportunity for experimentation using other frequencies for this style of operation. That's all for this time. Remember to send contesting related stories, book reviews, tips, techniques, press releases, errata, schematics, club information, pictures, stories, blog links, and predictions to contest-update@arrl.org 73, Brian N9ADG 17 Sep - 30 Sep 2020 An expanded, downloadable version of QST's Contest Corral is available as a PDF. Check the sponsors' website for information on operating time restrictions and other instructions. HF CONTESTS NAQCC CW Sprint, Sep 17, 0030z to Sep 17, 0230z; CW; Bands: ; RST + (state/province/country) + (NAQCC No./power); Logs due: September 21. VHF+ CONTESTS ARRL 10 GHz and Up Contest, Sep 19, 0600 (local) to Sep 21, 0000 (local); Any; Bands: 10 GHz to light; 6-Character Maidenhead Locator; Logs due: October 20.
AGCW VHF/UHF Contest, Sep 26, 1400z to Sep 26, 1700z (144) and, Sep 26, 1700z to Sep 26, 1800z (432); CW; Bands: 144 MHz, 432 MHz; RST + "/" + Serial No. + "/" Power class + "/" + 6-character grid locator; Logs due: October 12. 17 Sep - 30 Sep 2020 September 17, 2020 September 18, 2020 September 19, 2020 September 20, 2020
September 21, 2020 September 22, 2020 September 23, 2020 September 24, 2020 September 25, 2020 September 26, 2020 September 27, 2020
September 29, 2020 September 30, 2020
ARRL Information Click here to advertise in this newsletter, space subject to availability. Your One-Stop Resource for Amateur Radio News and Information ARRL membership includes a choice of one print magazine: QST, the monthly membership journal, or On the Air, ARRL's new bimonthly publication for beginner and intermediate hams. All ARRL members can access all four ARRL magazines -- QST, On the Air, NCJ, and QEX - digitally. Subscribe to NCJ - the National Contest Journal. Published bimonthly, features articles by top contesters, letters, hints, statistics, scores, NA Sprint and QSO Parties. Subscribe to QEX - A Forum for Communications Experimenters. Published bimonthly, features technical articles, construction projects, columns and other items of interest to radio amateurs and communications professionals. Free of charge to ARRL members: Subscribe to The ARRL Letter (weekly digest of news and information), the ARES E-Letter (monthly public service and emergency communications news), Division and Section news -- and much more! ARRL offers a wide array of products to enhance your enjoyment of Amateur Radio. Visit the site often for new publications, specials and sales. Donate to the fund of your choice -- support programs not funded by member dues! Reprint permission can be obtained by sending email to permission@arrl.org with a description of the material and the reprint publication. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ARRL Contest Update wishes to acknowledge information from WA7BNM's Contest Calendar and SM3CER's Contest Calendar. | |||
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