So lets try this again shall we???

A few of you will notice that there was a couple lines of a post made here… That no longer on line…  I fell victim to the old “Too many fingers on keyboard issue” while typing and somehow managed to post something way before it was finished…  Rather than try to edit it I just deleted all reference to it but as we know nothing is ever really deleted on the internet….

So lets try this again shall we???

Between sitting in the shack following the ARRL CW Sweepstakes using my DM780 software and heading outside with the FT 817 its been a great day…

I have not been participating in the Sweeps but I have been following it at times…  I am finding that the faster contesters are using some sort of computer assistance as I doubt anyone (or at least very few) could decode as fast as they are sending and the code they are sending is perfect…

If my CW Decoding program can copy it 100% then you have to be sending it with a computer…  If the spacing is off and the speed not constant then I think of a Key rather than a Keyer but when the speeds are constantly over 35wpm and the spacing is perfect then I am thinking some sort of computer assist is present….

Not that theres nothing wrong with that…  I was actually thinking of buying a Winkeyer and doing the same thing…  Using DM780 to decode and having DM780 also control the Winkeyer because it seems that is what everyone else is doing…  There has been a couple of DXPeditons I have heard operating CW that I have not been able to contacts (because my CW sucks) so why not use some computer assist just to get a few more on the DXCC list?  Everyone else does…

For those of you who don’t know… DM 780 is the Digital Mode part of Ham Radio Deluxe and it includes CW Decode and will also drive a Winkeyer… if configured correctly…  Now there are also lots of great software that will do all if what I have just mentioned but after a year I almost have HRD figured out so…  I’ll stick with what I know…  Nothing against the other great programs out there…

Above- The Par end Fed QRP Tri band (10-20-40m antenna)

When not watching the CW on my monitor I headed over to Weston Park with the FT 817 and the Par end fed QRP antenna and managed to make a couple of contacts on 10, 20 and 40m (SSB)…  I went out solely to make contacts on a couple of Canadian Nets that I just don’t seem to check in with as often as I used to…

I left the house around 1230 EST (yes there was a time change) and I got over to Weston around 1245.  One nice thing is with all the leaves off the trees its much easier to get the weighted line over the branch to support the Par in the sloper configuration…  This seems to work best for me… and only having to get one line over the tree branch works great as well…  At 1300 EST (1800 UTC) I checked into the Trans Canada Net on 14.140 USB.  This net runs every Sunday (and holiday) from 1800 UTC till they run out of checkins.

As the net name implies it is mostly for Canadian Stations but we do take all stations who wish to check in.  Canadians in the States or US Stations have to check in on CW as the US Bandplans do not allow Voice transmissions on 20m below 14.150 but the Canadian Bandplan does…

The net usually runs with 3 NCS stations (one in Ontario (VA3 VE3), one in Manitoba (VA4 VE4) and one in BC (VA7 VE7)) and that seems to cover the country quite well…  Today I checked in with VA7TA (Tom on Vancouver Island) and he was able to hear me but for him my signal was not the best but it was stong enough to make it from a park in Ottawa to Tom’s QTH which is just under 2300 miles away…  Not that bad for a 5w ssb signal and a wire antenna…

After that I jumped down to 10m and made a contact with VA3MPM (Mike) and VE3DLJ (Doug) who both live in Ottawa…  This would be a groundwave contact but I had talked to them on a local repeater when I was walking over to the park so I figured I would give them a contact on 10ssb and let them know what they were missing by staying inside where it was warm…

After that I aimed for 40m and checked into the ARES Ontario Net on 7.080.  This net meets at 1300 EST or EDST) every Sunday and is an informal roundtable where the participants compare notes on what their local ARES Groups have done in the previous week.  Over the summer I tend not to be in the right place at the right time to make this net and now that the cooler months are now with us I hope to check in more frequently…

If you have voice privs on 7.080 why not join them one Sunday and just say hi…

At about 1430 EST I decided that I had had enough fresh air… Also my thermos was out of hot coffee and so I packed up and headed back home.   Another fantastic time playing radio in the great outdoors…

So as you can see my day has been going quite well and also fairly busy…  Hope yours was just as good…

73bob

Thursday in the shack

Where else could I be today?

.

The CQWW SSB contest starts in just over 24 hours from now at 0000 UTC on Saturday and all the Big Guns are testing out their muscles in anticipation…

One nice thing about using HRD as a logging program is that it tells me the last time I worked some of these stations and guess what???  It was one year ago in the 2011 contest…

So far today (October 25th) on 10-15-20m I have managed to make 19 contacts in 18 different DXCC entities (Worked 2 different station on Cyprus).  I’ve been having a blast with the excellent band conditions.  According to HRD I did not work any new ones today but I now have a chance of back filling a couple of my unconfirmed ones as some of the new ones are on LOTW.  So far I am sitting at 94 out of 142 confirmed…

Tomorrow will be a quiet day…  The WX in Ottawa will be close to 20 deg C and sunny…  We are planning an early supper, to take advantage of the warm WX and have a family BBQ before the sun sets (cuz when the sun goes down so do the temps) and also to have dinner out of the way so I can participate in the contest until the bands die out or I run out of steam…

In the meantime… CQ DX  CQ DX…

73bob

EQSL return rates

Heres a bit of info for you….

Out of 1488 EQSL Cards that I have sent out I have recieved 617 back.  If I have done the math correctly that works out to be a 41.46% return rate.

Out of the 135 countries that I have sent an EQSL Card to I have 57 confirmed which works out to be a 42.22% confirmation rate.

Both percentages are remarkably close (41.46% VS 42.22%)

So now I’m wondering how my results match up with yours?

Now these do not count in the Direct/Buro sending and receiving of the Paper QSLs.  That could be a whole series of blog posts as we debate the future of paper QSLs…

I am starting to look at LOTW (Logbook of the World) now and in the near future it would be interesting what percentages of my contacts and my DXCC countries get confimred by that mode.

But in the meantime….  Do you think my EQSL return rates are about normal, good or bad?

In closing I will mention that I am happy with the EQSL Service.  I really like the way it interacts with Ham Radio Deluxe so that every time I enter a contact in HRD it automatically sends out an EQSL to the station.  It sure makes it easier for me…  Once I get my LOTW account open and get the logs uploaded who knows what the percentages will be..

73bob

But you know that already…

Good Monday Morning….

The weekend (Radio Wise) was not a total bust but to be polite the bands are less than optimal…  To be honest…. They would have to improve to be concidered Poor…

But you know that already!!!

I managed a couple of QRP Contacts on Friday PM from the Mer Bleu Swamp on 20m and 40m but not much else after that.  On Saturday I had a couple of great contacts from home including CK6S which is a special event station from the Calgary Stampede in Calagry Alberta (VE6).  That contact was a bit of a teaser as I listened along for about an hour after and I heard everyone that made contact with Calgary.  I thought things were starting to look up…  Like I said it was a teaser…

Later in the afternoon I walked over to VA3PSJ’s qth and we jumped in his jeep and took his IC703 over to Mer Bleu and tossed his Par End Fed into the air and tried to make some contacts…  Although it was not rare DX we did manage a couple of contacts on 40 and 20 but we did have to work for it… The 13 colonies special event stations did help and they were strong and were also listening…

Yesterday (Sunday) was a complete bust…  Nothing in the log although I did try a few times….

Actually with the exception of the RAC Canada Day Contest there have not been many log entries made this month and the RAC Log does not get posted in HRD as I  use the RAC logger for that one and can’t figure out an easy way to merge the logs…  Its on my list of things to do…

This week the plan is to try and get some yardwork done today and tomorrow (Tuesday) with the main idea being to get the radials for the S9 Vertical stretched out a bit better and then cover them with a topsoil and grass seed mixture so I won’t continue to trip when I walk in the back yard…  From my previous posts you should remember that the back yard is only 20 feet X 20 feet so its not as strenous as it sounds…

I’ve managed to check into the ECARS Net on 7.255 so far today with K1WTX in Turner Maine, who was the NCS for the hour.   Guess the band was a bit long…  Thats about 275 miles East-South-East of my home in Ottawa.  Not booming but he was a solid 5/7.

I guess its about time to head over and find the grass seed and the bags of topsoil that is available at the Property Managers Office and get to work before the sun gets too hot for yardwork…

73bob

 

 

 

Tuesday was a bust…

You know its not very often that I find a day that absolutely NOTHING happened with me in the radio world but yesterday was one of those days…  It was wet and nasty and I had to work around the house….  I tried listening a few times but just did not hear anything but mostly static and very low signals from people running KWs…

The sad part is that so far Wednesday is not looking much better so far…

However Tuesday I started to clean up the basement area and have most of it done so far…  Suprise…  I have a floor under the boxes…  I found a little more floor this morning as well…  My daughter’s new computer arrived and so I get the old one…  I will be using a 2 year old desktop in place of the laptop in the shack…  What I am hoping for is that the metal case might eliminate the slight issues I have with my FT450 throwing RFI at the computer that is trying to control it using HRD…

I don’t know for sure if its going to work but I am hoping it will and we should know soon if my efforts will be rewarded…

So rather than radio its more cleaning and computers…  but I do want everything set up and working PROPERLY in time for the RAC Canada Day Contest coming up on July 1st.  More on that in upcoming posts…

73bob

Some “Radio related” stuff

Today outside of a couple of local 2m repeater type contacts and a quick check in to the Trans Canada Net on 14.140 it has not really been a radio day…  I did get some antenna work done which makes the back yard look a bit neater (remember the saying… “Happy Wife = Happy Life”) so it was a good day.  The 2m antenna was put on a stronger piece of masting (no higher but now stronger) and the old masting is now holding up my Digital “TV antenna as I continue testing out that mode.

I’ve also seen a You Tube video on the new Yaesu Digital mode and also looked at the PDF files for the new dual band, dual mode (analog/digital) handheld which was shown at Dayton.   The last time I doubted the Yaesu Types was when they upgraded the features on the FT450 and also updated the price as well.

I’m not sure about this new digital mode but will reserve judgement till I read a little more about it…. 

If the Thunderstorms which are predicted miss Ottawa I might get on 80m later tonight but no matter what I will be in the shack…  I upgraded to the latest version of HRD and am having a bit of trouble getting everything to talk to each other as smoothly as it did with the old version.  I can log and I can control the FT 450 but I am having some trouble getting some of the other features to work…  If I could remember what I had to do last time getting HRD to talk to HRDLOG etc then it would be a good start…

Well….  I do have all evening…

73bob

 

If you enjoy CW

Seeing that my Foymount activity has been pushed back lets talk about the BERU Contest this weekend.

Yes it is a CW only contest but its a great chance to test your CW Skill, improve on your CW Skills or if you are like me test out your CW reading program.

I prefer the DM780 Program which is part of Ham Radio Deluxe. 

I really doubt that I will be making any contacts but I am hoping to get a few distant stations into my SWL Log…  The only real problem about using any CW Reader is that the computer is expecting perfect code…  Over the years using several different readers I have found that even those CW Operators who use a keyer have a fairly poor fist and you can just forget about the ones using the straight keys…  Their code is great…  the speed is fantastic and they can copy by ear much better than my laptop can but…  As the computer can only read perfect code their fists have to be less than perfect ( Now if that don’t get some comments flying around then nothing will…) as the computer can’t read their code…  From what I have heard using DM780 to rcv along with the Winkeyer to transmit is about the 2nd best way to operate CW.  The best way is to use your God given talents and operate with your ears to RCV and a straight key to Transmit but ….  Like I have mentioned many times in the past…

My CW skills would have to improve by 1000% just to be concidered bad…

But getting back to the contest for a few lines….  In Ottawa members of the Ottawa Amateur Radio Club will be manning the station at the Head Quarters of Radio Amateurs of Canada.  Listen for VA3RAC on the bands.  Congrats go out to the OARC for taking the steps to get the RAC station on the air from RAC HQ.  Speaking from experience this is really impressive as my two attempts to get the RAC station on the air in support of various NTS events were politely but firmly refused for various excuses…  I guess I shoulda been a contester…

73bob

After 24 hours of the ARRL DX Contest

The stats I am about to share with you along with comments come after the first 24 hours of the ARRL DX Contest…

In the first 24 hours I managed to get approx 13 hours of operating in…  Using the traditional “Popgun” method of “Searching and Pouncing” rather than the contesting sitting and calling CQ DX for hours at a time… I managed to come up with  the following:

106 contacts

50 DXCC Countries in total

3 Continents

2 NEW DXCC Countries

So far I am quite pleased with the results  Using my Yaesu FT 450 and my S9 43 foot vertical working 50 different countries in 13 hours of operating is about as good as I could hope for.  In most cases if I could hear them clearly I could work them.  If I had trouble hearing them…  They had trouble hearing me but in most cases after many repeats they got in the log…

I have learned some things this contest …  First of all I RFI my headset occasionally when I operate VOX on 10m and 15m.  By strange coincidence these are the same two bands that usually RFI and lock up my logging computer as well.  I guess there is stilll some work to be done with that issue.

I also took a look at my EQSL inbox and noticed that after 106 contacts made in day one that there were no confirmations.  Now perhaps its just me….  As I’m not a serious contester I just use HRD (Ham Radio Deluxe) as my logging program.  HRD lets me automatically send an EQSL Card out with every contact I log.  I figured that a few of the other casual contesters would be using the same system…  Well I  guessed wrong as nothing came to my EQSL inbox.  I know the big guns will be uploading their logs from the fancy contest logging programs in a week or so and they will be arriving in my EQSL inbox then.  I just was kinda suprised not to see anything instant in the EQSL file from the casual contesters like myself…

 I am getting closer and closer to running LOTW however.  From what I am seeing on other blogs and twitter this is the way to go if you want to get confirmations in a timely manner

One other thing I noticed is that my station does not really like the 10m band.  Recieve levels seems to be really low for me on 10,  12 works great and I hear lots but I was not using 12 in the contest.  I was not hearing that much on 10 compared to what I was seeing posted on the cluster.  However when I did hear a station (no matter how weak he was) I got him on the first try so it seems we did have propagation.  I guess once the snow melts I will have to re think my radial patterns in an attempt to get better results on 10m and also remove some leaking RF on the higher (10-15-20) bands so the computer stops locking up…

Anyway after taking another hour from my contesting day to sit here and ramble on…  its time to get back on the air and give out some more contacts…  Lets see if day 2 can be better than day 1

73bob

Country count climbing

Since I got the new gear up and running a few months ago my Country Count has slowly been climbing…  Today I managed to work TN2T (Republic of Congo) on 20m and after I got everything entered in the log I got an email from HRD Log that looked like this:

Congratulation,
Just reached 119 countries worked!

Personally I thought it was a nice touch…  Now bear in mind thats not 119 confirmed butI have sent 119 different countries an EQSL with a not so stellar return rate.  I think I actually have about 45 confirmed so there is still a way to go.  But also seeing that the ARRL and EQSL don’t see eye to eye on the DXCC program I guess I will have to upload my complete HRD Log File to LoTW one of these days.

You can see my last 15 contacts and a map of where my contact have been by following this link…

I have been talking about it for a while now and my plan is to send out a couple of runs of QSL cards out via the Buro and then also upload the log file to LoTW at the same time.  I figure between EQSL, via the Buro and finally via LoTW  will just about cover all the bases to get some of these countries confirmed… When I started using HRD as a logging program I really liked the idea that it would send out an EQSL for me every time I logged a contact.  I still do like that feature… Its the easiest for me right now…  I just wish more amateurs were on EQSL and then my problems would be over… 

With the recent announcement that the ARRL and CQ had worked out an arrangement for LoTW  and  I tend to agree with lots of the other bloggers who say this could spell the end of Paper QSLs…  The electronic highway seems to speeding up the process and most people seem to be in such a hurry these days…  

 However if everyone I worked in the next CQ WW SSB contest was on LoTW there would be an excellent chance that I could get my DXCC and WAS done and confirmed in one weekend…  Then the question could be asked  “What do you do for an encore?”

 The process continues…

Good DX my friends…

73bob

VA3QV Recent Log now on line

Thanks to Ham Radio Deluxe and its logging program and HRDLOG.net my last 15 logged contacts are now on line…

To see my log click here

73bob