Posts Tagged ‘Contesting Digital’
My first digi contest was very frustrating!
September 1st, 2020 | 
Author: Last week while making some FT8 contacts I received a message from one of the contacts I had made and he asked if I was going to be taking part in the upcoming WW Digi contest? He told me if I used WSJT-X software it was a simple matter of a few mouse clicks and I was good to good for the contest. I do have WSJT-X on my desktop but I am a user of JTDX for my digital operation. I had to update my WSJT-X software to 2.2.2 and as I was advised it was just a few simple clicks to set the software up for the contest. As I began the contest and started to send my CQ WW on the waterfall I was met with frustrations. Here are some of the issues I had:
- At first, the auto sequence was not working and as stations that were answering my CQ were going unanswered unless I did it manually. I don't have an issue with that but the auto sequence was turned on but not working.
- In the frequency drop-down menu, WSJT-X did not offer the contest frequency which was 14090 to 14092.8. When I tuned my radio manually to this frequency the software had the frequency in red and not the normal green.
- For some unknown reason and it was very random my rig would tune back to 14074. This had me calling CQ WW outside the contest frequency.
The above things kept happening and it was very frustrating and I ended up just shutting down. I did try JTDX and it did have the contest frequencies in the drop-down menu. I had no auto sequence issues and the rig stayed on frequency. One might ask why I just didn't stick with JTDX and keep going in the contest? The main reason was frustration but also I needed to have a contest log of the contacts to send off at the end of the contest. Maybe I could have configured it in JTDX but as I said earlier I was very frustrated.
