Episode 9: High summer on the air
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Email | TuneIn | RSS
You are not imagining things. Conditions really are slack, and it’s not just the time of year.
Summer months are typically slower, hazier, lazier times for contesters, but now that solar cycle 24 is closing in on the bottom of the deep performance trough that arrives every 11 years, this summer and perhaps the next two years will be a little – how shall I put this? – iffy-er than the great years we’ve had.
But don’t let that get you down. If you love radio contesting – and who doesn’t? – there’s actually more to do than one person has a right to expect for the rest of June and through much of July.
We’ll take a look at a bunch of contest activity in Episode 9 of Zone Zero.
Welcome to Zone Zero, the ham radio contesting podcast.
This is Bud, VA7ST, fresh back from a salmon fishing excursion on beautiful Vancouver Island, during which I landed a 12-pound pink salmon but lost the little derby with my two boys, one of whom caught a 20-pound white Chinook salmon and the other hauled in a 15-pounder.
Any way you slice it, that is plenty of fish packed home in the cooler. What we couldn’t eat fresh is now hard-frozen awaiting summer barbecues.
It is summer, so station-building continues. In our last episode, I talked about a new amplifier in the station – the AL-80B, which will give me some high power on 160M which I’ve been missing all along.
The Summer Stew
On June 18, we ran in the Stew Perry Top Band Distance Challenge – lovingly known as the “Summer Stew” – as a maiden voyage for the new amplifier on Top Band. I had grand visions of hundreds of QSOs running 500 watts to the full-sized inverted-L antenna.
But that wasn’t in the cards at all.
The Summer Stew doesn’t see a whole lot of activity – thunderstorms make for terrible noise across a lot of North America, so people go to bed rather than fight QRN all night.
And so, I only managed to make contact with a miserly 17 stations, netting a grand score of 38 points. And one of those was a 10-pointer with KH6ZM in Hawaii. But the amplifier performed like a champion, and the inverted-L offered a very low SWR, taking all that new power very nicely.
All Asia not so much
On the same weekend (June 17 and 18), we had the All Asia CW contest. That was 48 hours of very little coming out of Asia for this particular ham radio station.
Truthfully, conditions were so bad I only ended up putting in an hour and a half over the weekend working Asian stations. A measley 19 of them – 11 on 20M and 8 on 40M. It was just that bad here in British Columbia.
I invoked the familiar refrain: there’s always next year.
Ugggh. UKR-CLASSIC RTTY.
And then there was the Ukrainian Classic DX RTTY Contest – not to be confused with the Ukrainian DX Digi Contest, which ran over the June 24 weekend.
In the Classic DX RTTY, I made just three contacts – one in California, one in Hungary and one in Georgia. The state, not the country.
I’ll admit I was kind of preoccupied during that weekend plotting how I was going to catch more fish than my two boys, and even that plan didn’t pan out. In the end, I landed 39 contacts across three entire contests, and one fish on my vacation trip.
Better luck next time, I guess.
Field Day and Ukrainian DX Digi
The ARRL Field Day was this past weekend, June 24 and 25, along with the Ukrainian DX Digi contest.
I made a couple of contacts in the RTTY contest, but my focus was on Field Day. I started in the morning checking the battery packs for emergency power, and setting up a pair of 40-watt solar panels to charge batteries so I could operate my radio. I didn’t get started at at 1800 UTC Saturday – 11 a.m. here. Rather, it took me until 2030 UTC to get on the air, hitting 15M to make a pair of PSK contacts before jumping down to 20M for CW activity.
I alternated between two battery “boosting” packs, one about 8 ampere-hours, and the other closer to 16 aH, both with built-in inverters for 120-volt AC output. Normally, I would have run 13.8V DC directly to the radio, but I don’t have a DC cable for the rig I was using, so ran off 120V supply from the inverters in the packs.
The inverters rob you of power, naturally, and I figure they used about 30 percent of the available energy in converting to AC. Next year, I’ll have the IC-7100 as my less-hungry Field Day radio. This time out, while one pack was charging on solar, the other was running the radio gear, and I didn’t have quite enough solar power to keep things going full-time so there were lots of breaks.
And when the sun went down, all I had was what was left in the packs, so I only got a couple of hours of evening operating on 40M before I had to quit for the night and await sunrise to begin charging again.
I managed 104 contacts running about 4 watts output to the antenna. There were occasional low-voltage shut-downs as the radio I was using was pulling as much as 100 watts from the AC inverter during transmit. That will drain a modest battery storage system pretty quickly, and I made it for about three hours at a time with the solar cells topping things up in about four hours – meaning a one-hour deficit of no operation several times. The panels provided about 17 volts of charge at around 2 amps combined, so did an okay job of recharging the packs but I did fall behind.
I enjoyed running QRP with less than 5 watts, but it’s not as much fun wondering when the voltage will shut things down all of a sudden – which happened mid-contact twice over the weekend. For next year’ I’ll add some battery capacity and another solar panel or two, as they are quickly coming down in price.
Up next: Canada and Germany
Coming up for the weekend of July 1st and 2nd we have two super contests to choose from – and I would encourage everyone to set aside time for both.
The Radio Amateurs of Canada host the RAC Canada Day contest starting at 0000 UTC July 1 for 24 hours. It’s CW or Phone, all bands from 160M all the way up to 2M.
Multipliers are each Canadian province and territory, on each band.
I usually enter the CW-only category, which has no distinction between power levels – high-power or low-power, we’re all in the same category. I don’t mind, because having some power from my end makes things a lot easier for stations hoping to work VE7 for a multiplier, and I’m happy to hand out the points to anyone who calls in.
And for teletype operators, we have the DL-DX RTTY contest – one of the great RTTY events on the calendar. Sponsored by Germany’s DL-DX RTTY Contest Group – the DRCG – this one gets started at 1100 UTC Saturday and runs 24 hours.
You’ll be looking for any station anywhere, but contacts with DL stations in Germany are worth five extra points each if you’re outside Europe (and three extra points if you’re in Europe).
Multipliers are each DXCC country, and each call area in the US, Canada, Japan and Australia.
On the horizon: Summer cornucopia of contests
Just when you thought July was going to be quiet, one of the biggest contests of the year shows up. The International Amateur Radio Union’s IARU HF World Championship is June 8 and 9. It’s administered by the ARRL, and attracts the entire world in a massive event – and one I look forward to every summer.
We’ll take a look at that one next week, along with a peek ahead to mid-July’s trio of contests – the Digital Modes Club (DMC) RTTY, the North American RTTY QSO Party, and the CQ World Wide VHF contest.
You have to forgive me for being a bit more excited than usual about the DMC RTTY and the CQ World Wide VHF contest.
The DMC RTTY is restricted to speedy 75-baud RTTY and PSK63 modes, and the VHF contest is made for 6M and 2M operation on CW, phone and digital modes.
Well, this week I’m expecting the next piece of my 2017 station building efforts to arrive in the mail. I have purchased another transceiver for the radio shack – an Icom IC-7100, which has 2M and 70cm all-mode capability. Both have been missing from my contest toolkit, and I hope to have that particular operating gap filled by the end of this week.
Looking forward to a new bit of kit.
Thirteen years ago, when I purchased my US Towers tubular tower, it came with a 16-element cross-polarized 2M yagi which has been in the shed ever since. It’s going up on a pole with a little rotator soon, and I am rather keen to try my hand at VHF contests on something other than 6M – which both my FT-2000 and FT-920 already cover. I’m also interested in trying my hand at meteor scatter digital modes.
That’s the great thing about amateur radio – the list of things to try is absolutely endless. It’s a constant learning experience, as broad as your interests will allow. Who knows what you’re going to discover as your own next big thing?
That’s it for Episode 9.
If you don’t want to miss future shows, be sure to subscribe to Zone Zero on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or your favorite podcast platform. Tell your friends, and come back often for more.
Now, let’s go get ‘em. I’ll see you out there!
