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One continuing discussion in the VHF community is how to promote more activity, especially during the major VHF contests. One central theme that always emerges is how to modify the VHF contest rules to make them better, to make them fairer and to encourage new contesters. (Let me say up front that there is room for improvement in the contest rules but I don’t think rule changes alone will change contest participation significantly.)

In 2013, the ARRL contests added the Three-Band Single Operator and Single Operator FM Only entry categories. In January 2015, the ARRL added three more categories: Single Operator Unlimited High Power, Single Operator Unlimited Low Power, and Single Operator Unlimited Portable. These “unlimited” categories allow “passive use of spotting assistance” which roughly means these operators can monitor the various DX spotting networks but not spot themselves. The CQ Worldwide VHF Contest already allows passive assistance for all participants and self-spotting for digital EME and meteor scatter contacts. See the CQ WW VHF rules.

In January, the ARRL announced additional changes:

The Board … adopted amendments to the General Rules for ARRL Contests Above 50 MHz to encourage greater participation and band utilization. The changes become effective with the 2015 June ARRL VHF Contest. The revisions stemmed from recommendations offered by the Board’s Programs and Services Committee’s ad-hoc VHF and Above Revitalization subcommittee, composed of active VHF/UHF contesters, and they received strong support from the VHF/UHF community.

The subcommittee was charged with developing recommendations to increase the level and breadth of ARRL VHF and above contest participation and encourage operation on lesser-used bands. As a start to the process, the Board approved three changes that will permit assistance for all operator categories, with no effect on entry category; permit self-spotting for all operator categories, and allow single operators to transmit on more than one band at a time.

The changes will permit assistance in arranging contacts, but not in conducting contacts. They will, for example, allow a station to announce its location in a chat room, on a repeater, or even via e-mail.

The self-spotting/assistance issue is a hotly debated issue among VHFers, with two main schools of thought:

1) Contacts should be made completely independent of non-amateur assistance. Sometimes passive spotting assistance is allowed, but some folks want to eliminate that practice as well.

2) Contacts can be made with non-amateur assistance (spotting networks, chat rooms, etc.) as long as a complete radio contact occurs over the ham bands. This follows the common practice of internet spotting for EME and meteor scatter. Also, some rover stations have requested the ability to spot themselves when they enter a new grid.

There are a number of shades of gray positions between these two points of view (see the CQ WW VHF rules, for example), but I won’t try to explain them here. In general, I support the move to loosening up the restrictions on assistance (#2). Without good 6m propagation, VHF contests tend to be “QSO poor” and expanded use of spotting will allow for additional contacts. The potential risk is that we’ll get sloppy with what constitutes a legitimate contact. Once I know the exact frequency and call sign of the other station, it will be easier to “hear” the other station even when the path is not there. Of course, we already have this situation when we complete a QSO on one band and QSY to another band to work the same station. We know the frequency and call sign (and the grid)…did we really hear the other guy or just think we did? In the end, it all comes down to the integrity of the radio hams involved in the contact.

Those are my thoughts. What do you think?

73, Bob K0NR

The post Dorking With VHF Contest Rules appeared first on The KØNR Radio Site.

So Christmas has left us again. this time I’ll be glad to see the back of it after being and bit part player in the events in George Square, Glasgow just before Christmas and spending most of the subsequent days either laid up in bed or coughing and spluttering my way round the place.

On a lighter note the days between Christmas and New Year led themselves nicely to The RSGB Christmas Cumulative VHF series. A Contest run between the 26th and 29th December that gets me out of the house and either into the wilds of Cumbria at this time of year, or as it happened yesterday one of the clearest, crispest days we’ve had in a long time.

The contest is only a couple of hours long and the choice of band(s) is up to you. I thought it would be a good opportunity to take my dual band 2m and 70cm antenna that I got from Nuxcom in the summer. The antenna is a tad fiddly to construct in the field as the elements wander with the slightest touch but the lack of wind helped there.

The rig was the usual FT-857 that I have had on loan from the club for a while now that gives me my choice of 10w out on the VHF bands.

The map above shows my results. ODX was 450 miles to G7RAU, which equals my best to date. Other bigger stations will have undoubtedly made more miles but it’s not all about the DX. Hopefully I will get the chance to get out and about on the UKAC evenings as well as the back end of the year was a bit of a non event for me. Here’s an obligatory view form the ‘shack’ and dual band antenna (Here’s a link to the original site for the antenna)

The North America SOTA Weekend coincided with the ARRL September VHF Contest, which I interpreted as a great opportunity to do a combination SOTA activation and QRP VHF operation. A few other folks thought that was a good idea so we all got on the air from SOTA peaks on the Sunday of the weekend. I decided to operate from Mount Herman (W0C/FR-063) in grid DM79. I hiked up the same mountain for last year’s September contest and got soaked by the rain. Fortunately, the weather was excellent this year, making it a great day.

View from the south side of Mt Herman

For radio equipment, I took a couple of HTs for 2m and 70 cm FM and the FT-817 for CW/SSB on 6m, 2m and 70 cm. Most of the SOTA action would be on 2m FM but SSB is critical for working the VHF contest. I did put out the word to the usual VHF contesters that there would be FM activity and did work a few of them via 2m FM. The 2m FM calling frequency, 146.52 MHz, is commonly used for SOTA but is not allowed for contest use. (Another example of how this rule is just a barrier to contest activity.) We used 146.55 MHz for the contest contacts. I had coordinated with Brad WA6MM who was going to be on Grays Peak (W0C/FR-002), one of the Colorado 14ers. When he made the summit, I had my 2m yagi antenna pointed in his direction and easily worked him on 2m FM at a distance of 65 miles.  Brad was using an HT with a 1/2-wave vertical antenna. Also, I worked Stu W0STU and Dan N0OLD on Bald Mountain (W0C/FR-093) , which sits on the east side of I-25 right at Monument Hill. Contest activity was light, as usual for the September contest in Colorado. We did have two rover stations that activated a few of the unpopulated grids in eastern Colorado: George AB0YM and Jonesy W3DHJ.

Band       QSOs X pt =  QSO pts.  X   Grids   =     Points
 -----------------------------------------------------------
 50         8      1      8             5             40
 144        23     1      23            5             115
 432        14     2      28            3             84
 -----------------------------------------------------------
 TOTALS     45            59            13            767

My contest score was not bad for a few hours of operating QRP portable. It turns out that I had set the Colorado section record for “single-op portable” back in 1990 with just 624 points (using my old callsign KB0CY). Oddly enough, 24 years later it appears that I set a new record. (This speaks more to the lack of QRP activity during the September contest and less about my incredible operating ability.)

All in all, it was a great day in the mountains to take a hike and play with radios. I will probably do the SOTA + VHF Contest activation again.

73, Bob K0NR

Call: K8GU
Operator(s): K8GU
Station: K8GU

Class: SO CW LP
QTH: FM19li
Operating Time (hrs): 5
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs  Zones  HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
  160:    0     0       0       0
   80:   50     0       3       4
   40:   87     0      11      12
   20:   47     0       7      15
   15:   16     0       7       9
   10:    0     0       0       0
-------------------------------------
Total:  200     0      28      40  Total Score = 25,092

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

 
Since the birth of our second child, I’ve had to become a little more creative in my approach to operating contests.  There are rare days when both children are in phase with their eating and sleeping needs and we can accomplish some things, and then there are the other days.  With the coincidence of the quadrennial World Radiosport Team Championship (WRTC) and IARU HF World Championship contests this year, I thought I would make a game of trying to contact all 59 of the competitors rather than maximizing contest score.  The motivation for this is that WRTC was in New England this year, which is a stone’s throw away from me and middle-of-the-night operation would yield QSOs with the WRTC stations on 40 and 80.

I did end up working all 59 of the WRTC stations with their distinctive 1×1 callsigns by furiously searching and pouncing on both radios on 40 and 80.  In fact, I worked most of them twice before I finally found K1T.  I’m going to do an analysis of the standings of the teams versus when I worked them to test if any of the teams were better at “marketing” than others.  Should be fun!  Anyhow, all of these operators were really outstanding but a special congratulations to N6MJ and KL9A who seem to have run away with the whole thing operating as K1A.

In the lead up to the contest, I finally managed to get the station fully SO2R (single operator, two radio—essentially the ability to operate interference-free duplex on any pair of HF bands) again.  And, in the process, I have automatic band switching again, so I don’t have to run across the basement to switch antennas.  Thank goodness for small conveniences.

Here’s the mess for low-power (100 watts and less):  KK1L 6×2 switch to connect two radios to any of six antennas, W3NQN single-band 200-watt transmitting filters for each band (10-80 meters shown here since I still don’t have a 160 antenna yet), and the K6KV-K8GU triplexer that allows me to share the feedline to the G3TXQ broadband hexagonal beam with both radios.  All this stuff was homebrewed by me but it is all available in commercial form as well.

I’ve described the W3NQN filters considerably in the past, but the triplexer is new (built in March 2014) and since I’ve had some e-mail traffic from a couple of people who know I built one, I’ll probably write something up on it in the next few weeks.  I mention it here because WRTC is actually one of the events that popularized the use of triplexers, which are downright freaky when you think about plugging two 100-watt class radios into a box that separates/combines the signals.  Electrical engineering for the win on this one.  Anyhow, I based my triplexer off the K6KV QST article from June 2010, finding some beautiful Johnson capacitors in a flea market for $5 each and using leftover toroids from the W3NQN filter project instead of the solenoid coils used by K6KV.  The whole thing set me back about $30 total and it works great with the W3NQN filters, to say the least.

This was the second contest with TRLinux contest software by N6TR and W9CF.  It has some idiosyncrasies, such as the effect of CAPS LOCK on the shortcut keys.  For example, did you know that ALT-r is not the same as ALT-R?  The great thing about it is that TRLinux talks natively with the YCCC SO2R+ box that I use to handle keying and audio switching for both radios.  And, the band data is handled by the YCCC SO2R+ with TRLinux, so I didn’t have to buy a band decoder for the K2.  That whole process of setting up the band decoding was another midnight oil project Friday night before the contest started.  Fun and games.  But, it worked flawlessly.

And my three-year-old son, future SO2R CW operator, rocking the Bencher and Palm paddles…”I’m doin’ lots of Morse code!”

Just before the 4th of July, several sunspot regions rotated into view. Today, they are significant players in elevating the solar output of Extreme Ultraviolet energy — the energy helpful in ionizing the F-region of our Earth’s ionosphere. That, in turn, means better propagation conditions, even on higher shortwave frequencies.

As seen by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Sun is sporting quite a few sunspots, today. These are helping elevate the 10.7-cm flux, which is a proxy for solar output that strengthens the ionospheric propagation of higher frequencies in the shortwave spectrum. Expect good conditions on HF, this weekend.

73 and best DX!

Why would an amateur radio operator be interested in space weather?  Is it worth the time and resources to forecast propagation, in the daily operation of a typical ham radio station?

Gary, host of the popular ‘Ham Radio Now’ video podcast, talks with Tomas Hood (NW7US), propagation and space weather columnist for CQ Amateur Radio Magazine (and in the late ‘Popular Communications Magazine’ as well as ‘CQ VHF Quarterly Magazine’) and The Spectrum Monitor Magazine. Gary discusses with Tomas how scientists forecast space weather, and how the average ham radio operator can also make predictions, and what propagation forecasting can bring to the daily operations of an amateur radio enthusiast.

Watch on YouTube: ‘Ham Radio Now’ Episode 156: Propagation…

Tomas, NW7US, talks about radio propagation on shortwave (HF) as well as space weather.

Are you looking for some aids on learning Morse code, or to increase speed and skill? Let’s look at some great information and some software aimed at making your efforts successful.

(Note: I am not associated with any of the software. I just want to help you…)

I encourage you to look at the time-proven Koch method of learning Morse code. Below, we’ll look a little closer at this method of learning and honing your Morse code skill.  In the meantime, if you just wish to skip the details, here are some software links for learning tools using the Koch method:

+ For the PC, I prefer the G4FON Morse code ‘Koch Trainer‘. It is a slick program that is set up to help you learn and enhance your skills with Morse code:  http://nw7us.us/g4fontrainer – and his web site is at: http://www.g4fon.net/

G4FON Koch Trainer – Morse code learning on the PC

+ For the iPad and iPhone: On these devices, I use the ‘Koch Trainer’ by Nick / N3WG, found in the store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/koch-trainer/id405137883?mt=8

+ For the Android: I use the same software as for the iPad and iPhone, the ‘Koch Trainer’ by Nick / N3WG, here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.n3wg.kochtrainer – however, note that it is not compatible on the S4.

+ Some other Android possibilities that I have not tried:

• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.iz2uuf.cwkoch
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.bitninja.kmtpro

Again, I have not tried those last few.

Now, let’s talk about the Koch Method of Morse code training!

From my page on the Koch method (text was used by permission from the author):

Koch’s method is a simple, direct way of building reflexes. However, it requires either a computer and Morse software or a personal trainer. That’s why it was overlooked for so many years. Now that computers are commonplace, it should become the standard Morse training method. Here’s how it works:

You start out by setting up your computer (or a microprocessor-based code tutor machine) to send you Morse characters at 20 wpm and at an overall sending speed of at least 15 wpm. You then get out your paper and pencil and have the machine start sending — but only two characters. That’s right, for your first sessions, you’ll only have two choices. Copy on paper for five minutes, then stop the machine and compare what you copied with what the machine sent. Count characters and calculate your percentage of correct copy.

If your score is 90 percent or better — congratulations! You just learned your first two characters, and, importantly, you learned them at full speed. You’ll never have to learn them over again. If you didn’t make 90 percent, practice some more. As soon as you can copy the first two characters with 90 percent accuracy, add a third character to your practice. Your accuracy will drop as you work on assimilating the new character, but it will rise again to 90 percent or better. Then you add the fourth character, and so on.

This method does not allow you to build that lookup table in your brain. To copy at full speed, you must build the reflexes in order to achieve 90 percent accuracy. And that’s what you’re spending your time doing — building reflexes. Think of it as a parallel to perfecting a tennis swing or mastering a gymnastic routine; you’re practicing until you get it right. The Koch method of building code proficiency character-by-character is similar to standard methods of teaching touch typing, another skill that must be reflexive.

…

While the Koch method is the fastest method of Morse training, speed alone is not its principal advantage. Its principal advantage, and a major difference from other methods, is that it provides you with constant positive reinforcement. This begins with your realization, after mastering the first two characters, that you can copy code at 15 or 20 wpm, because you just did it. After that, each new character mastered is further proof of your progress. Contrast that to slowly trying to build speed up from 4 or 5 wpm, then hitting the plateau at 10 wpm and seeing no progress for a long time. With the Koch method, frustration is at a minimum.

Constant testing is necessary to ensure that you maximize the effectiveness of the Koch method. You must copy on paper, so you can grade yourself. Remember, if you score 90 percent accuracy or better, add another character. If you score any less than that, try again. By constantly testing yourself on continuous copying of at least five minutes, you know exactly how you’re doing and exactly when you should add another character. This results in the fastest progress possible.

…

As you proceed toward your goal, remember that some days are just going to be better than others and some characters will take longer to assimilate than others.

(Read the entire article: the Koch method).

Again, here’s the PC software link: http://nw7us.us/g4fontrainer

And, here’s a web-based way to learn Morse code.

Good luck! If you have questions, please share them – I’m @NW7US