Day #160 was another one where I only had a limited amount of time to play radio in the evening and so I had just two QSOs – I worked 9A8DX, Darko on 40m and then DF9DD, Eckhard using RTTY on the same band.
Day #161 saw some good Sporadic E conditions on both 6m and 10m and it was those two bands which saw most of my activity – On 6m I worked HA8IB, SP9RQH, YO6PJS, SQ5AAG and SP7HKK – My best DX with my homebrew loft dipole is now YO6PJS at 1,111 miles (1788 kilometres). On 10m I worked E73M, EE5DWS, TK4LS, EA3RKB, EG5FUV, EE5KB, EI9KC, SP1QXK, HG2011EU, OH0I, GM4SSA and LA4UOA. I finished up the day by having a quick chat with DL1FDL, Marco on 40m.
On day #162 I jumped around the bands a bit and spoke to DG1EA, GB2HS and OZ1RDP on 40m. I also worked YL2AG, CT1FJZ, EE5FL and CT1EEB on 10m and CT1BOL, CT1EEB, EE5KB, CT1EGW and CT2IOV all on 20m. In the evening I tuned past the RTTY section on 20m to hear a lot of signals so I fired up fldigi to discover there was a contest on so I gave away a few points. I worked quite a lot of stations so here’s a list:
20m
IZ2EWM, 9A5ZM, SX3B, RT3P, UA6CE, F4FNL, WA2ETU, VK3TDX, EA5DKU, W0YR, WB4ROA, AI9T, K9OM
40m
SP3GXH, DM5TI, PD0MHZ, PA3AJH, I1COB, DH6BH, DL6JZ, YL3FP, DH7LF, F8DHB, 5B4AIF
It was a bit of a learning curve as I’ve never worked an RTTY contest before and I had to work out what the exchange was and get the software working as I wanted it – Once I was all set up it was a simple matter to make the QSOs. I was very pleased to work VK3TDX on 20m using my delta loop and he was a genuine 599 signal. I also used the DSP on my rig for the first time as it enabled me to reduce the audio bandwidth and cut out strong signals that were nearby. As an example, here’s what the waterfall looks like with no DSP applied
RTTY waterfall, no filtering
And here it is with the DSP applied
DSP filter applied
You can see the bandwidth is much tighter to the signal rejecting anything nearby that could interfere and that’s important during a contest when there are a lot of strong signals on the band – Those shots above were taken outside of a contest situation where it’s not so important but it really helped during the contest.
