January sees the third running of the World Wild Award, an event organised by HamAward at https://hamaward.cloud which is all about making contacts. Throughout the entire month of January, over 100 Teams, most with special callsigns, consisting of over 1100 operators are on the air and looking for contacts. You can work each team station […]
Category: Contesting
My first ever RTTY contact
My QRZ page says “I started using RTTY with a Creed 444 teleprinter in the early 80s“. I thought it would be interesting to look back through my old paper logbooks and see if I could find my very first RTTY QSO. I spent a happy hour browsing through the logbook and it brought back […]
Replacing a rubbish foot switch
If you’ve got a headset or if you contest, you’ve almost certainly got a foot switch for your wireless, and the chances are that it looks something like this. I bought this years ago from Maplin for under a fiver and it’s been used as part of my station here, originally with my Heil headset, […]
N1MM Logger+
I enter a fair number of contests, for voice contests I’ve always used SkookumLogger, for data contests I’ve always used Fldigi and the less said about what I use for CW the better! I’ve always worked non assisted in contests, even those where there is no non assisted section and so therefore I’ve always been […]
New RTTY contest – Friday 4th October 2024
I have been emailed details of a new RTTY contest which will run for the first time this year on Friday 4th October 2024. It’s scheduled for the first Friday of October each year going forward. It’s called the URC DX RTTY Contest and the rules are pretty standard in that everyone works everyone. The […]
Review of 2022
QSOs made: 2,022DXCC entities worked: 141New DXCC entities worked: 4Total DXCC worked and confirmed: 286 Solar cycle 25 is really starting to ramp up now and this is demonstrated clearly by the fact that for the first time in many years, the country I’ve worked the most is the USA with 436 QSOs. Unsurprisingly, 15m is […]
Amateur radio picture of the week
Over the weekend I was operating in the World Wide Digi DX contest and I wondered if I could get a screen capture of my TS-890 just as I started transmission. I reached over and as the radio went into transmit, I hit the screen capture button and this is the result. As you can […]
Entering the Batavia FT8 contest
Oh this is going to bring the haters to the fore! Not only is it an 48 hour contest but it’s a 48 hour contest using FT8. Mind you, as it’s FT8, it only takes up a few kHz of the spectrum in an area that’s not used for SSB or CW so it shouldn’t […]
Hexbeam is fixed, DXCC 2021 and general updates
I posted back in January to say that the 17m element on my Hexbeam had snapped in the storms and was causing problems. It took over three months before everything came together to allow me to get the mast down and repair it but I managed it last weekend, just in time for the CQ […]
CQ WW SSB 2020
Last weekend was the biggest SSB radio contest of the year, CQ WW and I decided to put in an entry. I expected things to be slow going because we’re pretty much still at the bottom of the solar cycle. I was pleasantly surprised. Both 20m and 15m were full from bottom to top and […]
