February 2016

Happiness is ... another 11 ticks on LoTW including South Georgia Island confirmed on 80m - a rare one that.

As of Feb 20th, I’ve worked 200 DXCCs so far this year, putting me near the top of the annual league tables on Club Log.  Despite the disappearing sunspots, I wonder if I’ll match last year’s total?

I’ve put up my 5 element 15m monobander, retrieved from ZM4T’s former contest site.  Nice to be loud on 15m for a change!  The old HyGain TH3 tribander needs to be stripped down and cleaned up, again, but meanwhile I’m using Lee’s homebrew version of a trapless Force-12 2 element tribander, and that’s OK.  The new HF quad is coming along slowly as ever: next job is to repair the fibreglass coating on the spreaders and repaint them.

LU1ZI is a scientist/support bloke based on South Shetland. He’s fairly active and a good op.  Caught him on 20/CW so far.

3XY1T is a mostly Italian group in Guinea.  Naturally they are keen to work their pals in Europe but it’s good to catch their ears occasionally with the ZL prefix too.  By sheer guesswork, I figured out that their op calling “CQ up five” in English on 20/SSB was then adding something along the lines of “My Japanese friends: ignore the unruly pile five up and call me up ten ...” in very fast and indistinct Japanese.  Though I don’t speak Japanese, the pile of JAs ten up was a bit of a giveaway.

A31MM Hiro (JA6WFM) and the group at A35T are enjoying themselves on Tonga, and 5W0RR Roly (ZL1JQD) is having fun with 5W1SA Atsuo on Samoa, while 3D2AG Anton hands out Fiji to the deserving, mostly on digimodes lately.  I hope the 200 mph severe tropical cyclone Winston spared them, their families and hosts, oh and the antennas and shacks.

8R1AK is Esmond in Guyana, worked with a weak signal on 40/SSB but a distinctive Caribbean lilt and an excellent hand-drawn QSL card.

Z81X in Southern Sudan is proving elusive - although he is quite active, he rarely chooses bands that are open to ZL.  I caught him on 17/CW in the midst of ARRL DX CW contest, when most of the rest of the world was frantically swapping 5NNs with NA.  5V7TH has been quite active for some months now from Togo.  I’m still hunting an even more elusive D3AM in Angola ...

Also during the contest, KG4HF in Guantanamo Bay was hanging out on RTTY.  

Talking of the contest, I’ve noticed a distinct latency when working maybe one in five W’s.  They call CQ, I call them once and pause for a response, hear nothing and start to call again when they come back to someone ... by which time I’m also transmitting so we are doubling.  If we’re lucky, I catch them on QSK and interrupt my memory keyer in time to copy at least the end of my callsign and a report, but it’s touch-and-go, and I worry about mistakes in the prefix part of my call.  There are several possible causes for the pregnant pauses, including:

• Slow ops, perhaps a bit tired and emotional from slogging away at the contest
• Slow radios with noticeable digital processing delays (my end and theirs!)
• Weak, indistinct signals due to poor propagation, so they are unsure whether I have stopped calling or plummeted below the noise floor
• SO2R computer tangles - hitting the wrong keyboard shortcut, stepping on the wrong side of the footswitch, mental battles between the left and right brain ...
• Duelling SO2R ops interleaving CQs and QSOs on other bands
• Multi-ops contending for the transmitter 
• Distractions in the shack such as reading a book, catching up with emails or grabbing nanna-naps between QSOs
• Satellite delays, perhaps literally, if they are using remote stations or remote receivers via the Internet
• Pennies dropping: yes, it really is a Kiwi calling!

So I guess that’s the state of the art of contesting at the start of the 21st century.  Obviously enough, the delays and doubles harm QSO rates so I predict the apperance of “Low latency” in adverts for those fancy contest grade top-end software-defined radios.

C5DX is Alan G4DJX, on a school exchange trip in The Gambia.  He’s the headmaster, not a student, so he gets to ‘demonstrate’ radio while his colleagues help construct the biggest school hall in the country.  Alan hears me very well - 4 bands so far, all CW and all confirmed on LoTW already.