by 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 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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by 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: 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
by 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:
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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
