Weekend wrapup

As I mentioned in Friday's post, this weekend was the CQ Worldwide VHF Digital Contest, only I described it incorrectly. Or incompletely. 

CQ Magazine has been running a July VHF contest for years, but with the rather amazing rise in popularity of the digital modes (which I know I've talked about before) a group of hams who prefer the "good old" analog modes like voice, mostly single sideband (SSB), with a small amount of FM, along with CW (Morse code) have been finding the contests much less interesting, and I've read that a noticeable number of these operators have stopped participating in the contests. This year, CQ introduced a new concept: a second contest.  Enter the one you prefer or both of them, your choice. The "CQ Worldwide VHF SSB/CW Contest" was held in the first weekend of July with the same 24 hour interval as yesterday's VHF Digital Contest 1400Z, Jul 4 to 1400Z, Jul 5. No, I didn't participate in that. 

So how did it go? Miles better than contest I keep comparing to, last year's ARRL VHF Contest. With the start and end times for this contest being in the morning, it tends to help to remember that propagation will be toward the sun, with paths in the sunlit part of the day. In the mornings, we'll hear the eastern part of the US, and as far as into Europe we can (if we're lucky), while in the evening we'll get more openings to the west. My perspective on open to the west is that from here on the east coast of Florida, pretty much everywhere is "toward the west." That's how it went, only the opening toward the west coast was over pretty early, long before it was sunset on the left coast.

The two pieces of software I'm running and depending on the most are a second-source of WSJT-X, called "WSJT-X Improved," and a program that helps with human interfacing to WSJT-X improved called JTAlert. Describing how to connect them and even get started is "beyond the scope of this paper" (as they used to say). JTAlert's default display puts up a box where incoming messages are tagged so that we can tell at a glance if we've worked that station before, the station's grid square designation, notes if they're calling CQ or a few other things. When that display window contains a lot of calls, it can be hard to read what I need to get out of it in the 15 second intervals FT8 uses. For much of the contest, that window contained 40 to 60 calls in every 15 seconds. Somewhere in that 40 to 60 second interval is where I'd run out time to read it all.

So how good was the weekend?  During the 24 hours of the contest, I only worked two new grid squares (where New simply means I haven't worked them before). That's more or less a "Meh" result. This morning, while 6m was open to Europe, I nudged my number of countries worked up to having worked my ninth band DXCC (100 countries worked on each band). Needless to say, I haven't got 100 confirmed, and can't apply for that wallpaper until I get the 100 QSLs. In my work toward the 8 band DXCC I have now, I've just come to know I need to work a bit more than the 100. Five or 10 extra is generally plenty. 

This afternoon, with the contest over, I worked two more new grids, making the weekend total four. That's not remarkably great, but it's a good day. Certainly more than average. I'm trying to work new ones all the time and I know I've gotten two or three in one day several times. Of course, the more you have worked already, the fewer there are left to get in one day. 

This story about 9BXCC fits nicely with the idea of a post about QSLing, which seemed to get a positive reaction.  

And since this needs a picture here...