AA8IA Amateur Radio » RTTY

4th Quarter 2011 Contests

Mike — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:02:50 +0000

Usually I post contest summaries after every contest. But, as you can see, I haven’t posted much at all lately. Blogging is a burden, especially if you don’t have anything of interest to post. I typically post my contest results for the sole purpose of having my own online record of the contests I have worked. However, the 3830 reflector does a better job of archiving that kind of information than I could ever hope to.

The contests I’ve operated in [since WAG 2011] are:

10/15/2011 Iowa QSO Party
10/15/2011 New York QSO Party
10/29/2011 CQ WW SSB
11/05/2011 ARRL Sweepstakes – CW
11/12/2011 Worked All Europe – RTTY
11/12/2011 Kentucky QSO Party
11/19/2011 ARRL Sweepstakes – SSB
11/26/2011 CQ WW DX – CW
12/03/2011 Tara RTTY Melee
12/03/2011 ARRL 160 Meter Contest
12/04/2011 10-Meter RTTY Contest
12/10/2011 ARRL 10-Meter Contest
12/17/2011 Croatian CW Contest
12/17/2011 RAC Winter Contest

I have submitted all of those to 3830 except for the Croatian CW Contest and the RAC Winter Contest. I submitted checklogs to the sponsors for those two. Why? I was in it just for fun and didn’t want to worry about what the rules said. I just worked what I heard.

Makrothen RTTY 2011 Summary

Mike — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:50:15 +0000

Not much to say here. I got on the air for a short while Friday night and made a few contacts. I really wasn’t feeling up to this one since I had plans for putting in a lot of time in the PaQP and since there were some other contests I was thinking about dabbling in.

Makrothen RTTY Contest
0000Z-0759Z, Oct 8
1600Z-2359Z, Oct 8
0800Z-1559Z, Oct 9

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: SO/Single Xcvr LP
QTH: Toronto OH EN90ql
Operating Time (hrs): 0:53

Summary:
Band QSOs
————
80:
40:
20: 18
15: 3
10:
————
Total: 21 Total Score = 71,460

Club: Mad River Radio Club

CQWW DX RTTY 2011 Summary

Mike — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:08:19 +0000

Wish I would have put more time into this one. Had a lot of fun though.

CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY
0000Z, Sep 24 to 2400Z, Sep 25

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: SOAB LP
QTH: Toronto OH EN90ql
Operating Time (hrs): 18

Summary:
Band QSOs Pts State/Prov DX Zones
——————————————
80: 34 44 23 5 6
40: 146 272 35 36 14
20: 142 255 33 35 18
15: 111 248 14 41 15
10: 138 306 7 33 14
——————————————
Total: 571 1125 112 150 67 Total Score = 370,125

Club: Mad River Radio Club

Upcoming Operating Events

Mike — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 05:13:30 +0000

Below are some of the upcoming operating events I am interested in. For full details on any of these [and many others], check out the WA7BNM Contest Calendar

CWops Mini-CWT Test
1300Z-1400Z Wed, Aug 10
1900Z-2000Z Wed, Aug 10
0300Z-0400Z Thu, Aug 11

Hard for me to find time midweek for these short ones, but they sure are fun and help break up the monotony between the weekend tests.

WAE DX Contest, CW
0000Z Sat, Aug 13 to 2359Z Sun, Aug 14

Single-op stations can operate up to 36 hours, multi-op up to 48 hours. I forgot all about this one. I had a blast last year, but I struggled learning the whole QTC thing. I don’t think I’ll be any better off in that regard this year. The EU ops are brilliant, patient, and eager to take QTCs.

Maryland-DC QSO Party
1600Z Sat, Aug 13 to 0400Z Sun, Aug 14
1600Z-2400Z Sun, Aug 14

Two time periods. I want to make some Qs in this one since MD-DC is “just down the road” from me and they make contacts in the OhQP for us.

SARTG WW RTTY Contest
0000Z-0800Z Sat, Aug 20
1600Z-2400Z Sat, Aug 20
0800Z-1600Z Sun, Aug 21

This same weekend is the CW Ops Open inaugural and the NAQP SSB. I will have to sit out the SARTG WW this year.

CWOps CW Open
1200Z-1559Z Sat, Aug 20
2000Z-2359Z Sat, Aug 20
0400Z-0759Z Sun, Aug 21

I’m looking forward to this one. I’ve only operated once or twice in the mini tests, and they are great. I want to be there with bells on for this event.

Three separate four-hour tests. Work any or all three slots.

North American QSO Party, SSB
1800Z Sat, Aug 20 to 0600Z Sun, Aug 21

Single-op stations work 10 of 12 hours, Multi-op work all 12 hours.

SSB typically isn’t my game. Mediocre stations make poor SSB contesting stations. However, this is a domestic constest and is limited to 100w, so there will be lots of mediocre stations just like mine operating. I’ll play in this one.

NAQP RTTY 2011 Summary

Mike — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:22:16 +0000

Didn’t plan on operating this test — my focus was on CQ VHF WW. But, after
experiencing poor propogation there, I figured I needed a fix. So I jumped on
RTTY for a short while.

15m was bust. 20m wasn’t great when I was on. 40m was nice with quiet band
conditions. I didn’t have my doublet up for this contest, so I didn’t want to
put in serious time on 80/40.

Was good to work a lot of the usual RTTY stations. Been a while since I
worked RTTY.

North American QSO Party, RTTY – July
1800Z July 16 to 0600Z July 17, 2011

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: Toronto OH EN90QL
Operating Time (hrs): 1:34

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
——————-
80:
40: 33 21
20: 17 5
15: 1 1
10:
——————-
Total: 51 27 Total Score = 1,377

Club: Mad River Radio Club

ATTN: RTTY Contest Ops

Mike — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:22:09 +0000

I”m growing more and more fond of RTTY the more I work this mode. I really have a lot of fun in the contests. If you are a RTTY op who has worked me in a contest before, you likely have noticed that my exchanges haven’t been very brief and in fact have been quite lengthy at times. I do promise to attempt to shorten up the exchanges.

With that said, there is one thing I will not do. I will NOT omit items that the contest sponsor specifies as requirements in the contest. I’ll give you an example…

In the BARTG RTTY contest [starting tonight], the exchange is supposed to be:

RST SERIAL_NUMBER GMT_TIME ( ex: 599 001 2359 )

I will not omit 599 simply because everyone sends 599 and it can be presumed that 599 will be sent.

In a contest that specifies that the callsign[s] be sent as part of the exchange, I will not omit callsigns. Rules are rules. I feel that anyone who attempts to omit items from the exchange when the contest rules clearly state that they are required is doing everyone a disservice by claiming a Q that didn’t meet the smell test.

On the other hand, if the rules state that the exchange only consists of an RST, then an RST may be all that you get from me unless I need verification of your call/exchange or you need verification of mine.

I know, contesters in general want to make everything as short as possible in order to achieve the highest rate possible. But the idea shouldn’t be to merely achieve the highest rate possible but rather to achieve the highest rate possible in that particular contest within the constraints of the rules of that contest. If you want to omit items that clearly are required items per the rules, you’re cheating. Really, you’re cheating.

Now that the rant is out of the way, let me say that I to hear you and work you in the contest this weekend. My 65w and low wires should provide enough fun. BARTG is great because anyone can work anyone for points… nobody is excluded!

Worked All Europe (WAE) RTTY 2010 Summary

Mike — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:52:32 +0000

Let me start off by saying that I wasn’t sure I wanted to put a significant effort into this contest. Thursday night we get a call to say we are invited to dinner at my niece’s places on Saturday. She is an hour away and the dinner was set for 4 PM. That put the icing on the cake. I not only couldn’t refuse the generous invitation, but I wouldn’t want to. It’s always a pleasant time up in beautiful Carroll Co. I also knew that Sunday the family would be gathering here, which is what happens most Sundays. Between those two events, that’s 8 hours of daylight missed.

I also didn’t want to force myself to wake up nice and early Sat/Sun just to work the contest. In order to work any DX for mults and to pass QTCs, I needed to work 10/15/20m for the most part. My 80m doublet doesn’t do much DX on 40/80 in contest pileups. Of course, it’s not actually a “performer” on 20-10m either. I do have an Alpha Delta DX-EE that I switch in and out on those bands, and i use whichever one provides the best receive signal on the station I’m wanting to work. However, the DX-EE is even lower (average 20′), which doesn’t cut it for DX.

Because of all of the above, I knew I wasn’t going to get much DX nor pass much QTC traffic. One great thing about WAE DX RTTY is that any station can work any station and QTCs can be passed between any two continents. This provides much more competition since there are many more participants than there would be if you could only work European stations.

Being as ill-prepared as I am, I did not test the QTC system in N1MM prior to the contest, which means that some non-NA station was going to be my guinea pig. That just happened to be DQ4W, who was extremely strong. They sent me 10 QTCs. I copied/pasted them into the RQTC window. I then sent them ALL OK and closed the QSO. After the fact I realized that N1MM would not save the QTCs because one of the callsigns didn’t appear legit [because it didn't have a number]. I didn’t know at the time that I could hold down CTRL and click Save to save the QTCs, and so I put in a fake call and saved it. But, by that time I was already done with the DQ4W QSO and wasn’t going to contact them again to try and ask for a resend of QTC 8 out of batch ##/##. I don’t like creating undue hardship for other stations who are actually trying to win the contest.

I accepted QTCs four more times, and everything went well each time. I did not get a chance to send any QTCs [although I had many to send]. I didn’t think any DX signals on 10/15/20m were strong enough at the time for me to judge that they would hear my signal adequately to copy 10 QTCs without a lot of fills, so I did not nag any DX to accept any from me.

I have to wonder if conditions just weren’t great this weekend on 15/20m. Certainly there were stations, but they were always the same stations and rarely were S9+20. Of course, I didn’t expect 10m to be booming. I did figure I’d see stronger signals on 15m though.

To be honest, I’m sure a lot of it had to do with the times I was attempting to operate on 10/15/20m. As mentioned before, I didn’t wake up bright and early to work the contest, and I missed many afternoon hours on both days that would have been good hours for working 10/15/20m.

I was ill-prepared for this contest, which is unfortunate since I really love the WAE rules and format, especially the QTC activity. I’m sorry that I missed out on so much.

To be fair to myself, I worked less than 8 hours in this contest [out of a possible 36 hour total]. But even so, I should have been able to do another 50-100 Qs and passed a significantly larger number of QTCs than I did. So, I’m disappointed in myself. I guess everyone has their bad days :)

My Results:

WAE DX Contest, RTTY

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: Toronto OH EN90QL
Operating Time (hrs):

Summary:
Band QSOs Pts QTCs Mults
——————————
80: 11 11 0 36
40: 34 34 0 39
20: 5 25 20 10
15: 68 108 40 66
10: 14 14 0 14
——————————
Total: 132 192 60 165 Total Score = 31,680

Club: Mad River Radio Club

JARTS RTTY WW 2010 Summary

Mike — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:57:03 +0000

There were a lot of contests / QSO Parties this weekend, including NyQP, IlQP, IaQP I think, JARTS RTTY WW. I had to decide which ones I was going to work. Since JARTS started first and since I was jonesing to make some Qs, I started out with JARTS.

I managed a few nice little runs on the different bands. 15m was a really nice band for the contest this weekend. Interestingly, 10m opened up on Sunday and I worked some Qs there. Of course, with activity seen on 15m/10m, I can’t help but to try to make every Q I can on those bands. And JARTS was no exception. Unfortunately, it caused me to get a pretty low score.

I’m very disappointed. Why? Well, although I did enjoy working 10/15m so much, and although I did enjoy sitting for extended periods on one frequency calling CQ when nobody was answering, I completely failed to pay any attention to 20m. Hell, 20m is always open during the daylight hours into late evening, sometimes even longer. But I got so carried away with other bands that I pretty much totally overlooked 20m. Where others with equal stations have 125-150 Qs on 20m, I have 32 or so. And, of course, a lot of the 20m activity would be DX [and thus new mults]. So not only did I miss out on at least 100 Qs on 20m, I also missed out on quite possibly 30-50 new mults.

I compete against myself and a few others that I watch who run wires and LP here in the states. I should have been much closer in score to some of those guys, but I wasn’t. And I feel this was a direct result of me overlooking 20 for the mults and Qs. I remember many times where I sat calling CQ into the great abyss with nobody answering. Once in a while somebody would reply and then another immediately after, and this wouldd keep me going calling CQ for another 15 minutes with no productivity. I need to learn that if I’m going to call CQ, I need to abort very quickly if I am not seeing results. Had I managed to do that I most definitely would have ended up on 20m S&Ping and then throwing out some CQs.

All I can say is that the more I think about it, the more pissed off I am at myself for not paying attention to bread and butter bands to get mults. Even if I dont’ stick around to make 150 Qs, I at least need to chase all the mults I need when they are freely available to me on a DX band like 20m.

Weather was great… cool with a little rain, but no thunderstorms. And thunderstorms dictate my operating activities. I was feeling pretty good Saturday, but felt like I had a bug on Sunday with some dizziness and nausea. I did operate on Sunday, but not as much as I would have liked…. and specifically did not operate at a time when 20m would have been rocking. Go figure.

Radio ran perfectly. FSK was working great. Not a single crash or problem with N1MM or the computer. I was feverishly switching between my two wires on 10/15m as there definitely was a difference depending upon the direction I was trying to work.

All in all a great contest. I had no idea it was so popular. Once I realized it was a WW contest I knew it would be popular, but the bands were packed with RTTY. This one will be high on my list next year. Congrats to KB3LIX and K2DSL for their nice LP/Wires scores. I keep an eye on them in RTTY contests. Bill thoroughly whipped my ass this time around.

I worked the PJs quite a few times on RTTY [and SSB]. They were all over, and if you were smart enough to realize they were running split [it wasn't hard - they would tell you UP or UP 500-1000] you could pick them off in short order. Good signals from PJ-land into the states all weekend on all bands.

My Results:

JARTS WW RTTY Contest

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: EN90QL
Operating Time (hrs): 13

Summary:
Band QSOs Pts Mults
————————
80: 57 114 14
40: 93 191 25
20: 32 67 12
15: 64 136 25
10: 22 46 11
————————
Total: 268 554 87 Total Score = 48,198

Club: Mad River Radio Club

JARTS WW 2010 contest this weekend

Mike — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:44:20 +0000

The likelihood of me making a RTTY contact with JA is slim to none. However, we are all fortunate that this contest is open to everyone to work everyone, regardless of where you are at and where they are at. That means that anyone and everyone who operates RTTY or who has thought about it should jump on and makes some contacts in this contest. Details can be found below.

JARTS WW RTTY 2010 – October 16th, 0000Z to October 17th 2400Z

For us folks in the Eastern timezone of the US, that’ll be 8 PM tonight to8 PM Sunday night.

Hope to see you on!

Makrothen RTTY Contest 2010 – Summary

Mike — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 03:09:45 +0000

My Results:

Makrothen RTTY Contest

Call: AA8IA
Operator(s): AA8IA
Station: AA8IA

Class: SO/Single Xcvr LP
QTH: Toronto OH
Operating Time (hrs): 3.5

Summary:
Band QSOs
————
80: 2
40: 34
20: 25
15: 5
10:
————
Total: 66 Total Score = 354,654

Club: Mad River Radio Club

Comments:

Scored tallied by N1MM. Fun way to start the weekend while waiting for the
PaQP to commence. Thanks to the sponsors and those who worked me!