Posts from — September 2007

This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities.

Today’s tip: Learn from contesting pros.

Contesting pros are all over the place; on the air, quoted in print, and self-revealing in their write ups about the contest.

Yet, the rest of us tend to read the stories, check out the pictures, listen to them on the air in amazement — and ignore the lessons being taught to us.

One of the best ways of learning from a contesting pro is listening to that person running during a contest. Or working a pileup for that new multiplier.

One of the best ways of learning propagation is reading about the contesting pro checking 20-meters for that elusive long path opening and scoring a new multiplier.

One of the best ways of learning how a station should be set up is by examining the pictures that shows the placement of the hardware, computer, and logging windows used by the contesting pro.

No, the learning isn’t “in your face.” But you can learn a lot from the great contesters out there by looking for the lessons.

Scot, K9JY

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This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities.

Today’s tip: Join a contesting club.

Clubs are the heart of Amateur Radio, in my humble opinion. Hams in clubs provide support for their members, encourage ham radio friendships, and give focus and direction for their membership.

Now, general interest ham radio clubs are an important start to people who may be interested in contesting. There are usually programs provided to the membership about contesting or subsets of the membership roster who do ham radio contests. Most general interest clubs also sponsor a Field Day which is often the first glimpse of contesting-like operation for a ham (it was mine).

But most areas also have clubs specifically devoted to ham radio contesting. Because the club can submit club scores, the club is often geographically disbursed and meetings are anywhere from formal to ad hoc depending upon the club.

There are a few common characteristics of contest clubs. Most have an e-mail reflector. Most have a web site. Most have an electronic newsletter.

Off of these three common contest club traits come the unique advantages of belonging to a contest club:

• Contesting support. Someone in the contest club has your logging program, can answer your question about the rules of a specific contest, and can tell you their experiences in a contest with that radio and antenna setup that you are thinking of doing. This is much more specific support than you are likely to find at a differently focused Amateur Radio Club.
• Camaraderie. Because a contesting club will submit scores as a club, there is a much stronger sense of “team” in a contest club.
• Contesting e-mail reflectors tend to be much more active than other types of radio reflectors because of the focus on the results of the last contest or the planning of the next contest.

As with most things, specialization increases focus and knowledge about a particular subject. Specializing in contesting as part of your ham radio hobby is no different. And the fastest way to increase your knowledge about contesting outside of operating contests is to belong to a ham radio contesting club.

Scot, K9JY

This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities.

Today’s tip: Do an After Action Review.

After Action Reviews were originally done by the military, but now carry over into many different situations where one desires to improve performance. Essentially, an After Action Review provides a great feedback method — for a contester — to determine what could have been done better before, during, and after the contest.

While there is extensive documentation on how to conduct an After Action Review (for example, this “technical guidance” PDF file from the US AID organization), the review really boils down to answering the following questions:

1. What was expected to happen? This is where the importance of some level of goals for a contest is needed. Whether the goals are oriented to number of stations and multipliers worked or for non-contest oriented work, having an objective for the contest is the basis of knowing what was expected.
2. What actually occurred? At the end of the contest, where did we end up in comparison to the goals we had for this particular contest? This is not the events of the contest, but simply a comparison of we wanted “X” and we ended up at “Y” — so how close were we?
3. What went well, and why? Here we analyze the events of the contest to figure out what went well and why. For example, we moved to 20-meters at EU sunrise and enjoyed a two hour run. The why was because we didn’t wait to change bands; we moved away from 40-meters to twenty right at EU sunrise to get there at the beginning of the opening.
4. What can be improved, and how? Here we try and figure out what needs to be better next time. Perhaps it wasn’t testing the antennas before the contest and we found a short in the cable to the beam, or not reading the contest rules before the contest, or not getting enough sleep to really operate 80-meters as a single band. Whatever it was, this is the place to note the improvements.

What went well and what needs to be improved should be noted so that these areas can be addressed for the next contest.

While this can seem to be overly formal (and it could be…), the idea here is to take some time after the contest while the events are fresh in our minds and write down the answers to these four questions. In doing so, you will improve your contesting experience — both performance and your enjoyment of the contest.

Scot, K9JY

This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities.

Today’s tip: Challenge your operating skill with QRP.

There are some really hot operators out there — when they have the big amplifier with the stacked beams and in the right geographic location. But put them at an average station in a geographic neutral location and they can’t make the score of an average contester in the area.

Why?

Not enough operating skill. Contesters working without the benefit of thousands of dollars of towers, antennas, and location have to contest the old fashioned way: they have to earnit.

Consequently, they learn about propagation on the bands, how to bust that pileup without the best equipment and location, and when to call CQ and when to Search and Pounce.

If your operating skills haven’t been tested, I’d suggest this: operate a contest QRP.

First starting the contest, you’ll be totally frustrated — and that’s good. It tells you that you have to figure out new ways of working a station, getting that multiplier, and busting that pileup.

After a while, you’ll become less frustrated because a couple of things that you’ve done worked and you’ll start putting stations in the log.

After a day, you’ll have figured out a lot about what propagation has to be for you to work a station, how loud the station has to be at your S-meter before they can hear you, and whether or not tail-ending or calling off frequency works.

By day two, you’ll be less frustrated still and will get into a bit of a groove now that you’ve tried new ways of working stations.

By the end of the contest, the uncomfortable ways of trying to work a station will have become comfortable — the sure sign that learning has taken place.

And the next contest that your operate QRO you’ll have a better score because you worked the last contest QRP — and increased your operating skill because of it.

Scot, K9JY

This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities. Today’s tip: Learn a single band.

Many, if not most, contests operate on a 48-hour clock. As a single operator, you may have rules that state you can only operate a certain number of those 48-hours, but there are two full days of contesting where there will be a good number of signals on the air.

That is stating the obvious, of course. But this little obvious fact has some good implications — you get two full days of activity, two cycles to learn, and two opportunities to see how things work.

This is a perfect environment for learning how a single band works for propagation.

A band operates differently over the course of a day and night; the full 24-hours is rarely used by an amateur radio operator to learn about how a band operates.

For example, the midnight opening on 15-meters to Scandinavia from the east coast or the 4 PM long path to Japan. How 80-meters opens and closes with the grey line. Or working South America over the north pole long path.

Normally in a contest, we’d rarely check all of these paths because we’re too busy running on the hot band. But using the contest as an activity booster in a 48-hour time frame allows the ham operator to learn about a single band in a short period of time.

If you’re looking to improve your understanding of a band’s propagation, enter a contest in the single band category. You’ll learn about your band in a hurry.

Scot, K9JY

This month, I’m providing a ham radio contest tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you trigger your own contesting activities. Today’s tip: Use a grey line map.

For those who may be new to ham radio or propagation, the grey line is the area on the earth where the time is between day and night. This time period, longer at the poles, less at the equator, is both a wonderful propagation time and the time of transition between bands.

Knowing where the grey line is at the moment — using a great visual tool such as a grey line map — is a great accessory to have for a contest.

Depending upon where we are at in the sunspot cycle, ten meters can go from open to closed as soon as darkness hits or 160 meters can be open across the planet during the grey line and shut down to a chorus of static as soon as the sun comes over the horizon.

The grey line itself has many interesting, and perhaps still unknown, propagation characteristics as well. Signals travel further, are louder, and are geographic specific while in the grey line.

Consequently, in a contest the time between day and night or night and day is a big time of transition — and tough decision-making. Is the grey line running through our QTH and a distant multiplier that we need on 80-meters? Do I try and stay on 80-meters to see if a multiplier will be heard or do I shift to 20-meters and work the run? How should I use my second radio? How strong will the band open after the sun comes up? Should I try a higher band first?

This is classic contesting strategy: where on the bands should I be to maximize my score? The grey line work — for multipliers, for when to shift bands, for how the radio(s) are used — is one of the critical tasks for the contester to learn. And a grey line map is a great help in making those decisions.

Scot, K9JY