Category: RTTY

Episode 3: Four more QSO parties and ARI International DX

Episode 3: Four more QSO parties and ARI International DX

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Bud takes a look at the May 6-7 weekend QSO Parties for the 7th Call Area, Indiana, Delaware and New England states, plus the ARI International DX contest.

April’s behind us and it was a big month for QSO parties, with the Michigan, North Dakota, Ontario and Florida QSO parties.

Not to be outdone, May opens up with a bunch more so if you like to hunt around for counties you’ll be fully engaged this weekend.

This weekend we have one of my favorites — the 7QP, or the 7th Call Area QSO Party — but that’s just one of four state-based events starting Saturday. We have the Indiana, Delaware and New England QSO Parties as well.

So, get out the keyers, microphones — and maps — and go county hunting everyone.

7QP (7th Call Area QSO Party) 

The 7QP will have hams out from across eight states in the 7th call area — that’s Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona. And that’s a lot of hams and a lot of activity.

It gets underway at 1300 UTC Saturday, May 6, and runs until 0700 UTC on Sunday.

I sure love the 7QP but I never do well in it, because I’m just too close to Washington, Oregon and Idaho, though on 80 meters in the evenings I’m close enough that I can work just about anyone in those states, and it’s great fun to work the counties. And there are a lot of them across the 8 participating states.

I understand that two years ago nearly 1,200 stations in the 7th call area participated. That’s a huge number of stations you can expect to find in the CW, phone and RTTY bands over the 18 hours of the contest.

The exchange in this one is a signal report plus the two-letter state abbreviation followed by the three-letter county abbreviation. So, if you’re working a station in Arizona’s Apache county, that station would send you Alfa Zulu Alfa Papa Hotel — that’s “Arizona Apache.”

I think the hot tip for this one depends on where you are. For me, being so close to the Washington border that I could throw an Okanagan red delicious apple and hit the border, I’ll only manage a few contacts on the higher bands such as 20 meters, but as the day moves into evening I’ll start to hear and be heard on 40 meters and especially on 80 meters. I like racking up multipliers in the close-in states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana, picking up counties I just couldn’t hear on 20 meters.

For those in states further afield the reverse might be true. You’ll get the best signals on longer hops on 20 meters and maybe have less success on the low bands. But remember 40 meters and 80 meters can be really strong across the continent in the evenings.

So make sure you get on and see what you can hear.

The same advice applies to the other three QSO parties and I’ll quickly run through them right now.

Indiana QSO Party 

The Indiana QSO Party starts at 1500 UTC on Saturday and ends at 0300 hours. The Hoosier DX and Contest Club which sponsors the contest advises that for 2017 county name abbreviations changed. So be aware of that and check the revised list on the Indiana QSO Party website.

Delaware QSO Party 

Then there’s the Delaware QSO Party organized by the First State Amateur Radio Club. This one runs from 1700 UTC on Saturday and ends at 2359 UTC on Sunday. The state abbreviations changed last year so make sure you’re logging software is up to date the exchange to watch wars a single report and county. And if you’re an out-of-state station, send a signal report and your state or province, or “DX” if you are outside the United States and Canada.

A cool feature of this one is that it applies a power multiplier to your score.

If you declare in your log that you’re running more than 150 watts, you get a 1-times multiplier. For 150 watts or less, multiply your score times two. And for QRP stations running 5 watts or less, you can claim a 3- times multiplier. So that’s pretty neat.

New England QSO Party

And then there’s the New England QSO Party. Not to be confused with the Nebraska QSO Party, the New England event is often just referred to as the NEQP. I love this one, too, because it includes stations in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The New England stations will send a signal report and state and county abbreviations. So, a Berkshire county station in Massachusetts will send Bravo Echo Radio Mike Alfa or “Berkshire Massachusetts.” And you can look up the county abbreviations on the NEQP website.

ARI International DX Contest
Rules for: non-Italian stations, in English  | Italian stations, in Italian

And just so those that aren’t into QSO parties don’t feel left out, there’s a big international contest this weekend, as well. Sponsored by Italian hams, the ARI International DX contest is an all-mode, everyone-works-everyone event on CW, phone and RTTY.

Things get underway at 1200 UTC on Saturday, May 6, and run 24 hours. The rules are posted in English and Italian language versions on the ARI website.

The exchange for non-Italian stations as a signal report and a progressive serial number. Italians will send signal report and their Italian province’s abbreviation. I should point out that the ARI International has a short turnaround time for log submissions after the contest. They have to be submitted via a web upload — you can go to www.ari.it — and you have to do that by May 12 or your log might only be accepted as a check log.

There you have it a bunch of state QSO parties this weekend and a big ol’ international contest.

Here in southern British Columbia where I am, the lawns need mowing now that the grass is going so well, and so it’s “busy times,” but I’ll try and get on for a bit in each of these events and see what I can do at this part of the solar cycle.

You can read more about the podcast at zone.va7st.ca. Subscribe and tell your friends about the program.

73 from BC — thanks for listening and I’ll see you out there.

Additional resources

  • WA7BNM Contest Calendar
    As always, for rules and links to the Florida QSO Party website and just about every other contest in the world, check the WA7BNM Contest Calendar. It’s about the best contest listing out there.
  • Orca DX and Contest Club website
    For other links of use to contesters, check out the Orca DX and Contest Club website — it has a short list of upcoming contests, many mentioned in the Zone Zero podcast, plus a handy propagation tool for at-a-glance band conditions.

Building a contest station or a special project?
Find the parts on Amazon and support the podcast, too!

Episode 1.1: When conditions go horribly bad

Episode 1.1: When conditions go horribly bad

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This is a special post-contest update on April 23, 2017.

Oh my goodness, what a terrible weekend on the radio!

Feels like I wasted a couple of days there in the SP International DX teletype and the BARTG 75 RTTY contests.

Didn’t make many contacts in either one of them.

In the previous podcast I mentioned the importance of working all 6 continents. Well, I managed to end up with 3 continents in the log. I did get one European station — an EA station in Spain on 20M by pointing south of the aurora — but that was it from east of the Atlantic ocean.

I found a couple of South American stations and the rest were all North America. I did not hear any KH6 Hawaiian stations or any of the South Pacific ZL/VK stations in New Zealand or Australia, so I was shut out for 3 continents and had only 3 in the log.

It’s about the worst performance I’ve had in the SP DX RTTY contest in many years. That speaks to the conditions of the solar cycle.

We are definitely in the bottom of the trough of solar cycle 24, so that means the next year — perhaps two years — are going to be similar to what we saw this weekend.

There will be moments of happiness and smiles and sunshine, as conditions aren’t always this terrible, but we sure had a look at what the future holds for the next while.

Seeing the numbers

I thought I might give you some indication visually of what the conditions looked like over the weekend, so I went to the orcaDXCC.org website and took some snapshots of the propagation dashboard. By taking a look at the two screen shots from the morning and the afternoon of Saturday, April 23, you get a visual indication of how the solar and geomagnetic numbers changed across the day.

Propagation conditions about 10 hours later — at 0140Z on Sunday
Propagation conditions at 1520Z on Saturday

The dashboard, which has been in use since 2010 and compares favorably with real-world conditions, indicates in real-time what the band conditions should be, based on solar flux, sunspot levels, the A-index and K-index, as well as geomagnetic conditions.

At 1520 UTC on Saturday morning, April 22, we were enduring a geomagnetic storm at a minor storm level. The solar flux was 82, driven by 39 sunspots. However the K-index was 6.

Now, it’s nice when the K-index is at 1 or 2, because that means the A-index will be low.

The A-index is a cumulative number that’s based on the K-index over several hours. When the K-index is elevated the A-index will rise and it will rise dramatically if the K-index is elevated to a level like 6, as it was on Saturday.

So conditions really did get worse as the day went on. The aurora level was actually falling during the day, as you’ll see in the screenshots that I’ve included in the show notes for this special episode 1.1.

The aurora had fallen from 8.4 in the morning to 6.7 in the afternoon. That means it had fallen from about 55 gigawatts of power in the ionosphere to about 25 gigawatts of power in the ionosphere.

The big difference through morning to the afternoon – the obvious clue to why the bands got even worse as the day went on — was the soaring A-index.

Remember, the K-index in the morning was 6 and in the afternoon the K-index had fallen to 4.

Now, 4 or 6 are both high numbers for the K-index. And because of the number of hours that K had been elevated, the cumulative A-index went up – from 47 in the morning to 51 in the afternoon.

That really does mean that bands are completely wiped out.

You will get some reasonably useful conditions on short hops across the continent on 20 meters, for example, and that’s what I saw. I was hearing signals — they weren’t strong and there was some fading on the signals between me and Florida and the US southeast; however, on the lower bands conditions were quite bleak, especially as darkness fell here in western North America.

Now we look ahead to a series of QSO parties while we await CQ WPX CW in late May. That one will be a real trial of patience if this weekend’s conditions repeat a month from now.

If you like the Zone Zero podcast, tell your contesting friends about it. You can subscribe on iTunes, and please consider leaving a review so others know you’re listening and why.

Thanks for taking an extra few minutes this week for the Episode 1.1 post-contest update.

Episode 1: SPDX RTTY and BARTG 75 RTTY

Episode 1: SPDX RTTY and BARTG 75 RTTY

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In the first full episode of Zone Zero, Bud looks at the SP DX RTTY and BARTG 75 RTTY contests.

Both events include a continent multiplier, which adds a fun extra dimension as you scour the bands trying to find all six continents – Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, North and South America.

If you’re new to the podcast, let me point you to our introductory episode – which I’ve called Episode Zero – as it is a bit of an introduction with info about me and why I started Zone Zero. It’s a good primer for anyone wondering what this is all about.

I want to say a few words out of the gate about location. I am on the West Coast – in the gorgeous southern interior of British Columbia.

To give you an idea of the geographic location, we’re about 60 miles north of the Washington State border. Spokane, Washington, is about 260 miles driving distance to the southeast of us. And Vancouver, BC, is about 240 miles to the west.

Our location on the west side of North America means something to fellow hams from California all the way up to Alaska, as we combat the aurora borealis and its impact on the frequency bands we know and love.

The further east you go, the less you have to rely on the polar path to reach Europe, and the aurora has less impact. From my corner of the world, at least, I have to point directly through the heart of the auroral zone if I want to hear — or be heard in — Europe.

Auroral oval — a donut over the pole

So, imagine the aurora as a great big donut or bagel shape, suspended over the north pole. That donut gets bigger or smaller, depending on geomagnetic conditions – when the sun is storming — spewing a coronal mass ejection or high-speed solar wind at Earth — the aurora gets stronger and bigger, essentially absorbing radio signals so they simply do not pass through.

In this part of the world, if we want to reach Europe, our signals have to go through the near side of the donut, over the polar ice cap, then through the other side of the donut into Europe.

With strong auroral conditions, very little signal gets through – if any.

Now, sometimes, the donut pushes so far south that parts of Northern Europe are actually inside the oval. When that happens, we might see a curious phenomenon known as the Scandinavian Express.

If I point due north even when the aurora numbers are elevated, I can quite often work Scandinavian stations in Sweden and Norway, when I can’t hear anything else at all from Europe. That can add a few multipliers to the log when nobody else is hearing me over the pole – it’s worth a listen even on days of poor propagation.

It’s tough from the west coast, going through both sides of the auroral oval – it is a significant factor in contesting in northern latitudes, and in particular from the west coast of North America because there’s no other option for working Europe. Keep in mind that pointing long-path to Europe means going through the aurora Australis, which is usually just as strong over the south pole.

Over the past weekend, in the YU DX contest – where Yugoslavian stations were the focus from around the world – and in the Manchester Miniera CQMM DX contest sponsored by Brazilian hams – conditions were quite bleak, but we did make some contacts over the pole on 20M or 14 Mhz, and I even made two contacts in Europe on 40M, which from this part of the world can be a challenge during low-sunspot years.

So conditions were bad but not as bad as I expected.

Let’s take a look ahead at the upcoming weekend contests. There’s not a whole lot of contest activity, but there are two events I’d like to highlight.

My usual routine is to check the Orca DX and Contest Club website – that’s the club for British Columbia and Pacific Northwest – at orcadxcc.org. I’m the webmaster, and try to keep a short list of upcoming contests in the Contest Corner, and there’s also a very handy propagation dashboard I developed, which can give us an at-a-glance reading of band conditions.

In future episodes, we’ll explore the Orca propagation dashboard in some detail. For now, I see that the geomagnetic field K-index has been up and down on April 19, currently at 3. If that K index is elevated over several hours or days, the A-index will rise, and I like to keep an eye on the A-index as it can help predict how good or bad radio conditions will be.

For example, right now the A index is a whopping 17, the geomagnetic field conditions are active, and the aurora level is 7.2 and rising. Simply put, the bands are pretty much shut down right now.

But maybe things will improve by the weekend. And maybe not. That’s sort of the challenge for radio contesters — predicting what radio signal propagation will be like, because that can dictate how you will operate a particular contest. It will certainly help you decide whether to optimize your score by trying to find DX contacts or go for higher rates of lower-point but more plentiful domestic stations.

For this weekend – April 22 and 23 – we’re looking forward to the SP DX RTTY and BARTG 75 RTTY contests. Both of these are “everyone works everyone” worldwide contests using radio teletype.

Now, it’s no fun listening to someone reading details about time, date and rules for a contest, so I will encourage you to get the details online – check the show notes for this episode one at zone.va7st.ca for links to the orcadxcc.org website and the best contest calendar I know of, the WA7BNM Contest Calendar (which you can also find with a Google search for WA7BNM).

Up first this weekend is the SP DX RTTY contest, sponsored by the Polish Radiovideography Club. It starts at 1200 UTC on Saturday, April 22, and runs 24 hours.

I really enjoy radio teletype contests. The important thing in this contest is to work as many Sugar Papa or SP stations in Poland as possible.

One of the tips and tricks is to be on the air when Europe is open. These days, from North America’s east coast you may catch a morning opening on 15M, but on the west coast that’s unlikely.

20M will be the big band for Europe no matter where you are.

For me, I expect a very narrow window for working Europe on Saturday morning – possibly for only an hour and only on 20M or 14 Mhz.

The multipliers in this contest are each DXCC country and each Polish province – and they count on each band. So if you work Iceland and Hawaii on 20M, you can work them again on 40M as new multipliers on that band, too.

What I think is a fun feature of the SP DX RTTY contest is that you take all of your contacts and multiply them by the number of countries and Polish provinces you’ve worked, and then multiply that by the number of continents you worked.

One of the challenges, with conditions the way they will be, is to find Africa.

From the North American east coast and Europe, that won’t be too difficult. From the west, it can be much more difficult. But pointing antennas just south of the auroral oval, if conditions are reasonably okay, can produce contacts with North Africa and the mid-Atlantic islands, such as EA8 – the Canary Islands, which are counted as Africa.

Those will be like gold this weekend. All the other continents should be relatively easy to find. The ZL stations in New Zealand and VKs in Australia have been relatively active in recent months, and KH6s in Hawaii should be a slam-dunk from all of North America, so the Oceania continent will be pretty straightforward.

That’s a quick look at the SP DX RTTY contest.

The other contest is the BARTG 75 baud RTTY contest. And it’s a short one!

It’s a four-hour contest, starting at 1700 UTC on Sunday. Its uniqu e feature is operating with 75-baud RTTY. Now, most RTTY contests are 45 baud. But at 75-baud, you can call CQ in a second and a half, so the cycles of CQing and listening are quite rapid and you can reach high rates, particularly for a RTTY contest.

The multipliers are all the DXCC countries as well as the call areas of the US, Canada, Japan and Australia.

And you also get to multiply your score by the number of continents you work. I like that feature. Continent multipliers can boost your score quickly – but the challenge is you have to find all six continents to really be competitive. The big gun stations will find them almost certainly.

If conditions are bleak, though, even Europe could be tough to land for some of us – and I would encourage you to get those continents in the bag as quickly as possible. Remember, you only have four hours to find them all.

Looking at previous years, I usually have found six continents – Oceania, Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, but not always. This weekend, if the Canary Islands or our friends in Morocco like CN8KD are active, I might get Africa, but that’s not a sure thing. There have been other, longer contests that took me 12 hours or more to get them all – often Africa is toughest, but even South America can be challenging if there aren’t many operators on the air.

In this one, I think six is doable.

Okay, I think that’s wrap for the first show. You can read more about the show and find episodes at ZONE.VA7ST.CA, our home site.

Subscribe and tell your contesting friends about the program.

You can email me at [email protected] with thoughts about the podcast.

73 from British Columbia, everyone. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you out there.

Show resources

  • WA7BNM Contest Calendar
    As always, for rules and links to just about every contest in the world, check the WA7BNM Contest Calendar. It’s about the best contest listing out there.
  • Orca DX and Contest Club website
    For other links of use to contesters, check out the Orca DX and Contest Club website — it has a short list of upcoming contests, many mentioned in the Zone Zero podcast, plus a handy propagation dashboard for at-a-glance band conditions.

Building a contest station or a special project?
Find the parts on Amazon and support the podcast, too!