 September 1, 2021 Editor: Paul Bourque, N1SFE | |
IN THIS ISSUE
In addition to the weekly slow-speed CW contest opportunities like the K1USN SST, on Wednesday (US) this week is the Walk For The Bacon QRP contest for CW speeds at 13 WPM or less. The popular weekly CWops Mini-CWT contests culminate in the yearly CWops CW Open, the first session on September 4. The All-Asian DX Contest (SSB) starting on September 4 goes the full 48 hours. Unless conditions are really poor, there will be many DX stations to work. The exchange includes the age of the operator, providing insight into contester demographics. For RTTY DX, try the Russian WW RTTY Contest. Colorado's QSO Party is on September 4 and 5, two separate sessions from 7AM to 10PM Mountain time. Tennessee squeezes all of their activity into 9 hours on Sunday, September 5. The weekend of September 11, look for the North American Sprint (CW), and the Alabama QSO Party for contact opportunities. Sprint-format contests can be daunting due to the pace and conventions used for the exchange. For DX, try DARC's Worked All Europe DX Contest (WAE-DX SSB), or the RTTY Russian SRP Digital Telecommunications Cup. Complete information for all contests follows the Conversation section 2 Sep - 15 Sep 2021 September 2
September 3 September 4
September 5 September 6 September 7 September 8 September 9 September 10 September 11
September 12 September 13 September 14 September 15 Please be cognizant of any hurricane or tropical storm relief efforts that may be underway, and avoid any frequencies being used for them. Related: "FCC Grants Temporary Waiver to Permit Higher Symbol Rate Data Transmissions for Hurricane Ida Traffic" North American Sprint Start Time Reminder: A reminder for everyone that the starting time for both the September CW and RTTY Sprints will be 0000 UTC. The experiment of starting at 2300 UTC in February and March was successful but no decision has been made on whether that change will be made permanent for those contests. No change in starting time has been proposed for the fall CW Sprints. For an article covering the effects of the time change in February, check out ncjweb.com/sprint-scores/February-2021-Time-Change-Effects.pdf. (Ward, N0AX) The Antique Wireless Association has a vision "To preserve and share the history of technology used to communicate and entertain from the first telegram to today's wireless text messaging." Radio, specifically amateur radio, had a large role in early communication history. The AWA sponsors a number of contests during the year, and participants use vintage gear, or gear built in the style and tradition of long ago. The first contest is the Bruce Kelly 1929 QSO Party, over the November 13 and November 20 weekends. If you start soon, you might be able to build a transmitter between now and then. The Portable Operator's Challenge is a relatively new contest with its second running to be held on September 4-5. This contest "is designed to optimize equal operating conditions for portable operating during a contest involving non-portable stations." It does so by using a scoring metric that takes into account contact distance, fixed or portable station operation, mode, and number of transmitters. The contest is also broken down into three, four-hour periods, and there are even prizes! For more information on the event, see the contest website. How did I miss this one? Sean, KX9X, wrote about "Lesser-Known Ham Radio Contests" last year at about this time for the DX Engineering blog. GHz-Europe.com recently featured the "KB7Q 23cm EME Magical Mystery Tour" on their website. Gene, KB7Q, went on an epic 54-day road trip, lugging a folding dish (design by W2HRO) and 500 watt amplifier. Here's a great post by Tim, N3QE, to the CQ-Contest reflector about log checking, in response to a question by Rich, NN3W:" Has anyone ever done a Dayton forum or online forum on contest log checking?" Tim provides three excellent references: "a personal history of log checking by N6TR, and it (also) includes some details about WRTC 2006...Doug's, K1DG, PowerPoint slides from Contest University in 2018 "Reading and Learning from your Log Checking Report" and his NCJ Article "What You Can Learn from Your Log-Checking Report." N3QE also points out that advances in computing power over the years combined with exclusive acceptance of electronic logs have made scoring even the largest contests fast. The ARRL September VHF Contest starts on September 11 at 1800 UTC, and finishes September 13 at 0259 UTC. September can be a time for tropospheric propagation, which can help with the contest goal of working as many grids as possible on the VHF, UHF, and higher bands. Award categories include single-operator, rover, multi-operator, with multiple sub-classes. Grab some gear and hit a high spot, try a rover entry, or team up. Any legal mode is permitted. As always, see the rules. Ray, W2RE, provides this advice when shopping for real estate for a remote location: "...finding the right remote QTH takes time. The top three factors when considering a remote location.
Here's an album from start to current status of a recent station build. In the album you can see how the process works." Ray's link is to the construction of Remote Ham Radio's Jonesport, Maine location. Scott, N3FJP, has done it again: "Amateur Contact Log 7.0.2 is now available! ... The primary emphasis for this release is our added support for the annual Route 66 event, which runs from September 11 to September 19" Scott also notes that he's completed revisions to all 100+ programs in his logging program package. Alex, K6LOT, succeeded in getting a WSJT-X compiled natively for ARM64 on his MacBook Air M1. He notes the performance of the app on this hardware is impressive: "WSJT-X uses 3.5% CPU on my MacBook Air M1. jt9 uses 2.2 % on average. jt9 on my fancy MacBook Pro Intel 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB of RAM uses 26%." His comparison may not be entirely fair, since the M1 machine was decoding ambient music using the internal microphone vs. real signals. You can track Alex's progress in the message thread. The Icom IC-7300 is a very popular radio, but the designers didn't anticipate every need. For example, there is no factory option for use of a dedicated receive antenna. Hamtenna seeks to fill that void with the IC-7300 RX-Antenna board. The product is a board that fits inside the radio, with a toggle switch and SMA connector taking the place of the auto-tuner connector on the radio's rear panel. The price is listed as kr1.290, which at today's rates is approximately $149 USD. "Where's that Radio? A Brief History Of Direction Finding" on Hackaday.com Contemporaneous "Existing or occurring in the same period of time" In the ARRL General Rules for HF Contests below 30 MHz, rule 1.4 states: 1.4. Each claimed contact must include contemporaneous direct initiation by the operator on both sides of the contact. Initiation of a contact may be either locally or by remote. This rule means that an actual operator must initiate each contact by an operator action such as keypress, use of a paddle, key, pushbutton, and so forth, during each contact. It precludes the use of "automatic QSO machines" in any form (hardware, software, etc.) to make contest contacts. The Spokane DX Association has a YouTube Channel maintained by Mel, N7GCO, with DX- and contest-related presentations and virtual workshops. Recently, the focus was N1MM Logger+. Randy, K7TQ, and Jay, WS7I were the presenters. The N1MM Logger+ series currently consist of:
"HF Mobile Contesting" by Jim, AD4EB, walks through what he does to enter as an HF Mobile in state QSO parties, but is also a great introduction to QSO parties in general. This video was posted by the Williamson County, TN ARES organization, WCARES, and it's production qualities are notably excellent. Max, NG7M, got his Alpha Delta fan dipole to 10,440 feet, using a 10,380 foot mountain and a 60-foot tree, while he was on a camping trip in the Uinta National Forest.. "NodeRED for Ham Radio -- Starting from Scratch and Examples" - AA0Z hosts a panel to "review the basics of NodeRED, how to create a flow from scratch and add it to the dashboard." NodeRED is now being used at W1AW for some station automation tasks. None this time. How to Consistently Get Spotted by CW Skimmers and the Reverse Beacon Network Bob, N6TV, provided these hints to consistently get spotted when CQing in his presentation to the Spokane DX Association:
A study by the University of Liverpool found more evidence of a 200-million-year-long cycle in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. By studying material from ancient lava flows in Scotland, they sought to determine the relative strength of magnetic fields at the time the lava solidified. RTL-SDR.com summarizes the SDRA2021 (Software Defined Radio Academy) talks that have been uploaded to YouTube. The event, held June 26-27, 2021, included "Classification of Shortwave Radio Signals with Deep Learning" by Stefan, DC9ST. Accuracy is NOT the same as precision for atomic clocks, according to an article in IEEE Spectrum. According to the article "Why The Sapphire Clock Outshines Even The Best Atomic Clocks," for some applications like frequency measurement, an accurate clock is necessary. For other applications, the uniformity and consistency of the clock signal is paramount. "A crystal with greater spectral purity" sounds a lot like lower phase noise. The new clock has already found application in higher-resolution over-the-horizon RADAR applications, and is expected to be useful to quantum computing. "The Principles Underlying Radio Communication" was published by the National Bureau of Standards; a 1921 "revised edition" is available for your throwback reading pleasure. Perennial Topics As we swing into fall and another contest season, revisiting a few baseline topics might be in order. Topics that we all "know" about, or maybe think we know about, but don't talk about much, well, because we know about them. Some contest newcomers may not yet know about them. The first, maybe most basic thing: Why are we doing this? To have fun! We should all keep that in mind in hours 38-48 of a 48-hour contest, or on 20 meters during Phone Sweepstakes, or for some people, during any Phone contest. I sometimes consider what "fun" must mean in certain contexts, like when I overhear someone being wished to "have fun!" after a particularly grueling contact exchange. I now think of "fun" as encompassing the entire contesting experience: setting some reasonable personal goals, getting the station ready for a contest, then being able to put everything else on hold and losing oneself in the operating of the contest. After the contest, recalling particular contacts or situations that occurred during the contest. Maybe sometime later, seeing one's call sign high in the results listing. Advice to read the rules before each contest could go without saying, but that really disadvantages those who are just getting started, and those who aren't. Rules change from year to year. For example, there are now more than a few QSO parties allowing the use of FT4/FT8 modes. About those contest exchanges: Making as many contacts as quickly as possible requires efficiency, and the removal of any words or symbols in the exchange that aren't required by the exchange. The archetypical undesirable habit is saying "please copy," or unnecessarily repeating a received exchange back to the sender. Try not to do this. Even though it seems like the ultimate goal is for a human operator to resemble an infallible robot by doling out contacts efficiently for hours on end, it's still okay to say "Hi Bob" when Bob makes a contact with you. That also makes it more fun for Bob. Contesting can be more fun if you share the experience with others. Join a contest club, or a DX or other radio club with contest tendencies. With many clubs going online for their meetings over the last 18 months, it's never been easier to get to a meeting. ARRL maintains a list of contest clubs affiliated with the ARRL and club affiliations are listed in many 3830scores postings. Contesters have their own set of hurdle-words for newcomers. For example, CQ-Contest usually means an email reflector on lists.contesting.com. RFI, Amps, Towertalk, TopBand email lists? Also on lists.contesting.com. ContestCalendar.com used to be called "Hornucopia," after the domain it was hosted on. "3830" used to mean a frequency on 80 meters, but it now means 3830scores.com. Glossaries can help with contesting terms, too. A few of them are ARRL Contest Glossary, Contest University's Contesting Terminology, and RSGB Contesting Terms. Contesters are mostly always learning. Information about contesting in general has never been as available as it is today. Email reflectors, Twitter, Instgram, Groups.IO, YouTube, ContestUniversity.com...all of those, and more, have amateur radio contesting-related material. Learning how to use website-specific searching is key to finding information. An even greater challenge can be determining if the information is valid. Radio contesting at its heart involves competition, involving rules, ethics, and reputation. One rule that doesn't always get mentioned in the official rules, but is implicit: Contest With Integrity. Randy, K5ZD, talks about how integrity is at the core of contesting in this presentation from 2019's Contest University. It's really okay to submit a checklog if you misread the contest rules and operate outside of them. Have Fun! 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 2 Sep - 15 Sep 2021 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 Walk for the Bacon QRP Contest, Sep 2, 0000z to Sep 2, 0100z and, Sep 3, 0200z to Sep 3, 0300z; CW; Bands: (see rules); Maximum 13 wpm, RST + (state/province/country) + Name + (Member No./power); Logs due: September 9. VHF+ CONTESTS Two-Meter Classic Sprint, Sep 4, 1300z to Sep 4, 1330z; CW, SSB; Bands: 2m Only; Serial No. + 4-character grid square; Logs due: September 7. IARU Region 1 145 MHz Contest, Sep 4, 1400z to Sep 5, 1400z; All; Bands: 145 MHz; RS(T) + QSO No. + 6-character grid square; Logs due: September 13. VHF-UHF FT8 Activity Contest, Sep 8, 1700z to Sep 8, 2000z; FT8; Bands: (see rules); 4-character grid square; Logs due: September 13. Also, see Worldwide Sideband Activity Contest, SKCC Weekend Sprintathon, FOC QSO Party, MI QRP Labor Day CW Sprint, Tennessee QSO Party, SKCC Sprint Europe, Colorado QSO Party, 2 Sep - 15 Sep 2021 September 2, 2021 September 3, 2021 September 4, 2021 September 5, 2021
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September 13, 2021 September 14, 2021 September 15, 2021
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. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ARRL Contest Update wishes to acknowledge information from WA7BNM's Contest Calendar. | |
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