ED5T and the 2013 Russian DX contest

Once again, conflicting agendas meant that I wasn't able to take part in this years Russian DX contest. However, Vic EA5KV and CW wizz Belar EA5YI got together with our contest mentor José Miguel EA5DFV and long time contest partner Pascual EA5CLH, for a multi-single entry. I was finally able to get up on sunday morning to witness the end of the contest, and find out just why those who participate say this is a great contest!

The guys managed a nice rate throughout the contest (over 2700 contacts in 24 hours) but looking at the scores posted so far, seems that the score was pretty average, there are a lot of big numbers out there! To be fair, the antenna situation meant that there weren't antennas available for the mult station, only one tribander, the 40m yagi, and wires for 80 and 160. The 40m yagi was shown to tune up nicely on 15 though and some multipliers were caught that way!

Here's a shot of the summary at the end of the 'test:

This gives an idea of why its a nice test: 24 hour format, CW and SSB modes, and countries + russian oblasts as multipliers, makes for an interesting exercise in strategy planning.

And at the end of the day, what counts is "having fun", and I think the final photo shows some pretty happy faces! (How much iof that is also to do with the fact that we got to put José Miguel's Elecraft K3 through its paces?!)

From L to R, EA5DFV, EA5KV, EA5YI, EA5ON, EA5CLH

Lets see if next year I'm able to participate in this one.

ED5T ARRL SSB PHONE 2013

It seemed like a good idea at the time, I suppose.... But really, I am not cut out for 40m contesting. Or any low band contesting, come to that. It's incompatible with my lifestyle, but more importantly, it's incompatible with my circadian rythmn.

The reasons for deciding 40m were simple enough: Firstly we didn't have many operators, with only two of the TCC club members available for the whole weekend, so no option to do a serious multi-single entry. Last year when this same situation occured, we did two SOSB entries on 10 and 15m. But this year, we had just installed a new 2 element yagi for 40m and this was an ideal chance to try it out. Also Elías EB5KT had never done a single op entry, in spite of operating in many multis at ED5T. So it was decided: I would do 40m SOSB HP and Elías SOSB 10 or 15, depending on the solar flux.

As usual, the runup to the contest was hectic. We finally managed to get the yagi installed and tuned 3 days before the contest, but no chance to even leave the tower cranked up due to very high wind and rain right up until the eve of the event. At work things were hectic too, with power cuts and system crashes all through friday leaving us with fraught nerves. I finally made it up to the station around 1900, just in time to raise the tower in twilight and leave it guyed. Elías had already set up the gear, except the Acom 1000 for his station which I brought up, so we were able to go home for dinner and I even managed an hours sleep before heading up to begin.

It looked promising to start with. After a few teething problems with headsets and the audio settings, I found a good frequency and started QSOing in the runup to start time. But, 30 seconds before starting, big signal EI7M started up only 1kc away from me, rendering the frequency useless. After a brief fight, I decided to work the band, and got a few in the bag before deciding that my option was to work split. I was lucky to find a clear transmit frequency but was often having to change my receive due to others using the same one, plus heterodynes from broadcast stations. And so I continued with a slow but steady rate for 3 hours, until the band almost dried up. I finally managed to find a spot to run in simplex, but by the time the sun was well up, I had only got 382 QSOs in the log and 43 multipliers. Two years ago in Multi Single, we had over 700 QSOs in the same period.

Here's the new yagi at sunup on satruday morning:

I went home, exhausted, but unable to sleep more than an hour. In the afternoon, I managed another hour, but by the time I got back up to the station, I was already experiencing the disoriented feeling that comes with sleep depravation. Elias left the shack around 2200 after putting 800 qsos in the log on 15, and I got back on 40. This time I was able to find a simplex run frequency and managed OK up until midnight. But when the rate meter started dropping, so did my eyelids, and in the end I stumbled out to the car, pulled out my yoga mat, dropped it on the floor, and fell asleep instantly....

Two and a half hours later I got up again and back on the radio, and from then until breakfast time managed to get another almost 350 odd QSOs in the log before the band started dropping out. This time when I went home, I managed to sleep fine! Here's my not-too-pretty face before heading home:

Sunday evening I headed up early and while Elías continued working the pile on 15, I got a message from Vic that high wind and heavy rain was forecast and could I please lower the tower. At this time I was thankful for that thoughtful christmas present from my brother-in-law, a head torch! Very useful for trying to find the guy ends in the vegetation at night. Shame I forgot to pull out the safety rod installed through the tower to prevent it completely collapsing in the case of pulley failure. The motor then stuck and I started cursing.....thankfully 10 minutes later it decided to come back to life and I was able to complete the job.

Back in the shack, I got on 40 once Elías finished on 15. After a while I thought the rig was a bit deaf, and after checking, seems like the relay in the AL1200 was sticky. We gave it a bash and it came to life, but at that stage, with the dipole instead of the beam, and a sticky linear, I decided to call it a day, with 745 qsos and 54 multipliers in the log. I hadn't set myself a goal, but I certainly was not satisfied with the result.

However, on reflection and as Bob K8IA says, doing this is good experience. I'd never done 40 SOSB before and while I don't think I'll be doing it again in a hurry, I'm sure the experience will help me in future multi-op contests.

I was also able to get a good chance to try out the new home-made 2 element yagi against the dipole, one of the main objectives of this contest. I have to say that I really didn't notice much difference, so it's perhaps back to MMANA modelling software to see where we maybe went wrong.

And of course everything is relative. I was comparing my score with our previous effort two years ago, and also to EF7X who was operating in the same category as me and with who I was in constant contact with throughout the contest via the EA-contest whatsapp group. José Ramón did a magnificent effort, putting in twice my score. However I also have to remember that not too long ago, I could only have dreamed about working all states bar Utah in one weekend on 40 metres!

Thanks to Elías EB5KT for his moral support and accompanying me some of the time, here he is "noshing on a sandwich", as he was spotted by K9PG:

Also thanks to the rest of the Torrent Contest Club for letting me do the SO effort. In 2 weeks time we hope to be back to Multi Single in Russian DX!

Thanks to all for the QSOs and  C U in the next one!

JW7XM, beyond the 59

Around 25 years ago, I found myself in New Haven CT, home amongst other things to Yale University. I remember at that time seeing a poster somewhere, inviting students to join the Yale University amateur radio club W1YU. The sales pitch was, that it was a unique way to meet people in very different walks of life and it was equally possible to talk to people such as the king of Jordan, or a russian coal miner. I really liked the poster but didn't stay long enough to meet any of the group.

Nowadays, internet is very much present in the developed world and in some repects we have become pretty blasé about the size of the world. Also in ham radio, many of us know that while its true that you CAN talk to such far away and interesting people, if you are lucky enough to talk to for example a foreign King, there won't be much chance to chat and see what the kings life is like. In the case of the russian coal miner, you are more likely to work them, and they'll have time to chat, but there is then the language problem in many cases.

What happens is that often, the contacts we make are with people whose culture is known to us, often because of our modern news media and internet, and some of the¨"magic" that used to exist is a bit lost.

On friday night, I was lucky enough to be able to talk to a rare DX station and have a half hour chat with him. The station in question is Harald, JW7XN, on the island of Svalbard, north of scandinavia. Whilst not the only licenced operator there, he is the only active operator, although it is true that the radio shack at club station JW5E is available for rental and quite often put on the air. The fact is that being the only operator there, every time he calls CQ, he generates huge pileups for people wanting to contact Svalbard as a new country. But, like most hams, he also likes a chat from time to time, and as luck would have it, he stumbled across my CQ call on a relatively empty 20m band and came right back to me. He also speaks perfect english!



We talked about many things, both of his life there and also my life here. One of the fascinating things he told me about was the difference in daylight hours between winter and summer. There, they know exactly what day they will start to get sunlight after a period of 24 hour darkness in winter, they know how many minutes earlier the dawn will come every day (27 minutes every day!!), and exactly which days they will have 24 hour days in the summertime.

Another thing that struck me was when he said that the signals were a bit degraded by the aurora that they were having at the time. I came back and mentioned the alternative name of the "northern lights", to which he commented that they are so far north, that on some days, and it was one of those days, the aurora actually formed SOUTH of him, and so to him, the aurora was actually a southern light!

Harald is a telecoms engineer, and his job for the following day was to travel to a remote repeater site to do some maintenance work. The trip was 100km....on a snowmobile, and in -20ºC temperatures! He said he would probably see some polar bears on the way. Summer can be a bit nicer, he days, with average daytime temperatures between +3 and +8 degrees, with an all time recorded maximum of .... +14ºC!

Harald eventually had to leave to go for dinner, and commented that in the 2 hours he'd been in the club shack, he'd left his car running outside, otherwise it would have been tough to start and freezing cold to drive home. It made me feel lucky to be sitting in +15 degrees.

Thanks Harald, for taking the time to give me an insight into an unknown world, and to bring back a little bit more of the old magic via ham radio.

ED5T Barbecue 19 Jan 2013

After all the christmas and new year festivities, it was time to get back to the serious business of contesting.

However, since we didn't have any contests in mind and we had lots of stuff to talk about regarding antennas and future plans, we decided on having a barbecue instead :-)

Juan EA5GIE has some orange trees and a small shed for his agricultural implements near Picaña, just outside Valencia, with a bbq/paella setup on site, so we gratefully accepted his invitation to hold the "meeting" there. And so, after a foray to the local mercadona supermarket to stock up on provisions, we rolled up at Juan's. It was cold and windy, and started to rain a bit, so we took refuge in the shed to set up shop.

Here's José EA5GS and Juan Carlos EA5UF, feeling the cold a bit:

And Juan EA5GIE and Belar EA5YI, slaving over the coals:

After a great lunch of roasted artichokes, sausages, pork, chorizos, and black pudding, with baguette and "all i oli" garlic mayonnaise, we got down to the serious business of tackling the proposals made regarding future plans at ED5T. Here's quick shot of Vic EA5KV, Jose EA5GS, and Elías EB5KT, tucking in:

And after a long session, with lots of strong coffee and stronger liqueurs, we finally managed a consensus about the road we will be travelling down at this humble contest station. Info about the specifics will be published as and when it happens, but the basic idea is that we will upgrade from being "two tower, two tribander" station, to a "three tower, with some stacked monoband yagis" station. This will be a lot of work and will take a lot of time, so don't hold your breath!

Thanks to Juan for providing the great location, no distractions and great food! Ah, and yes, we did pick mandarins straight off those trees for dessert, here we are almost caught in the act:  (Not the kind of folks you'd like to meet on a dark night, EA5ON, EA5KV, EA5GS)

Telescopic whips: MFJ 1956 vs MFJ 1977

Many years ago, I bought the MFJ 1664 screwdriver antenna, and since then this has been the basis of my mobile antenna system. It is comprised of a manually tuned screwdriver coil at the base, a small 4 and a half foot telescopic steel whip for using while driving, and a 10' telescopic aluminium whip (sold separately as model 1954) for using while parked.

The 10' whip is a little bit fragile, as many users have already testified on user reviews at www.eham.com and other sites. My first thought to improve on this was to purchase a solid steel whip, but since these aren't readily available in Spain, I had to wait a few years. It was by chance that one day my friend and customer Pablo Baulies was in New York and I asked him to pop into a nearby radio shack and pick on up for me. He obliged, although if he'd known the problems Air France were going to give him to bring it back, he'd have said no! The steel whip is great, but a bit heavy when its windy, putting a lot of stress on the base mount, and also is too big to be hidden away in the back of the car.

I continued to use mostly the 1954, having them break from time to time either at the base, or in between sections when they got corroded. These antennas do not like water! It's not a problem living in Valencia, but I would hesitate to use them in a wet country.

A couple of years ago my friend Rod EA7JX started stocking the new 12' version of this whip, the 1956, at his shop in Seville, www.hamradio.es , so I got one, this making it easier to install a full size 20m quarter wave using the whip, a 3' dx engineering mast, and the coil, with no turns added. However the first one suffered the same fate as the 10 whips and after about a year, failed between the second and third sections, rendering it useless.

The other day, local ham EA5FBD mentioned he had a 12' whip he wasn't using so we agreed that I would take it off his hands and give it some use. To my surprise, when we met, I saw that it wasn't the 1956, but a new model called the 1977, made of stainless steel. This looks to be a big improvement on the aluminium design. It's the same light weight, but the joints between sections are well defined and look to be much better (1956 left, 1977 right)

 The base also looks to be a more solid design and also should be less prone to failure.

There's only one way to tell, so I have already pressed it into service and looking forward with interest to see how it fares with high winds, rain, and salt spray. I'll post an update in a few months time.

I see that MFJ also now make a 17' version, the 1979, which in principle should allow users to make their own quarter wave vertical for any band between 20 and 6 (and maybe even 2) metres. Good news for portable and semi portable operators like myself looking for a small lightweight antenna that will give full monoband performance with easy deployment.

Food for thought

These last few days, we have experienced some of the best days of the current sunspot cycle, with the solar flux index being up around 170. Even though it's midwinter here in the northern hemisphere, and 10 metres hasn't opened up like it would at equinox with these SFI values, propagation has been nevertheless pretty good. It means that not only is propagation into the pacific good at sunrise, but also into places like Alaska and Japan at the same time, not to mention very strong local signals. It has also meant coast to coast openings into the USA later on, mostly on 17 and 20 metres, and allowing 59 contacts into Hawaii plus good contacts into southern Africa too.

This afternoon I found myself home alone in front of the radio and since things had been good from the car, I thought I'd switch on, something I haven't done for at least a couple of months (from home). First contact was with PH9HB/AM, piloting his Boeing 737-800 over Mauritania, on a flight from the Gambia back to Amsterdam. I've already had a number of contacts with another pilot on one of these planes, Cyril DF1CHB. Not surprisingly they are friends!

Next contact was with New Zealand station ZL2JBR. I was extremely surprised to hear his 59 signal punching through the high QRN with the beam still pointed to west Africa, which is sort of long path to his area, since normally in our afternoon/evening, signals would normally come through on the short path. After turning the beam back and forth a bit, I settled on a heading over south east Africa, a setting many spanish stations had used to work ZL9HR last month. John came back to me with a 59+ and we had a nice long chat. While talking, we both looked at each others respective QRZ.com profiles. John's profile shows a ham dream location, perched on the top of a 300m high cliff right on the ocean:



I also learnt how, after he had read Les Moxon's famous book "HF antennas for all locations", he tried experimenting with different antenna heights on his tower, finding on the 20m band two heights where the signals into Europe were signficantly stronger than others. And, contrary to poplar wisdom, the highest was not the best! On the 22m tower, the best spot by a long chalk was at 11m high. This goes to prove that whilst on flat land an antenna will pretty much follow a pattern of "the higher it is, the lower it radiates", on uneven terrain things can change quite signficantly due to reflected signals.

While talking, John also looked at the photos of my mobile station on the profile and wondered if I'd ever operated by the sea with a cliff either behind me or beside me. His experience is that this kind of setup can also produce extremely high gains in the direction of the reflection.

So, after this stimulating chat, we will see about using the motorised tower at ED5T to see if we can find any interesting differences at different heights, and also I will be checking out google maps to see if there is anywhere near here where I can go park up next to the sea in front of a cliff and see what happens! Results will be posted here....

VISIT TO ED1R

ED1R is without a doubt one of the top contest stations in Spain nowadays. At ED5T we have followed the fortunes of the group from their humble beginnings through to the present station they have in the small village of Papatrigo, a rural area in the province of Avila, northwest of Madrid.

The mastermind behind all of this is Jesús, EC1KR, a 29 year old native of the village but resident in the provincial capital, 20 minutes away. Jesús and myself, together with EC2DX Imanol, are the organisers of the 2013 URE team in the IARU HF championship, and since URE approved our proposal last month, we have been talking about getting together. This is not easy, since the nearest common point to the three of us is over 3 hours drive, but as luck would have it, during a christmas family visit I found myself an hour away from Papatrigo and with a morning to spare, so Jesús kindly agreed to come over and show me the station.

I arrived a bit before Jesús and his mum opened up for me so I could see around. The first thing that struck me was that the antennas are all in a relatively small lot. Basically the station has been set up in an old cowshed in the middle of a vegetable garden! There are four towers there, and the second thing a visitor will notice is that the 10 and 15m antennas first installed are really rather low. A fifth tower is "in process" but like many things in Spain, the economic situation means this plan is on ice for now.

I won't go into details about what's there, if you are interested there is plenty of detailed information on www.ed1r.com , but will comment on some things I thought of interest.

First of all the antenna setup is designed to give rapid movement in different directions. There are both fixed and rotatable antennas, plus the addition of a TH5 tribander using the novel 4O3A triband splitter (see http://www.4o3a.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=127&Itemid=509 ). All of this uses custom designed software by Pablo EA4TX (http://www.ea4tx.com/wp/?page_id=59) for easy on-screen point and shoot, plus Pablos software controls stack selection using the SJ2W stack match (http://www.sj2w.se/contest/?page_id=1557).

All of these technological innovations were very interesting to see working, and I was able to sit down at one of the stations and see how easy it was on 20m to use the 4 element DX beam pointing towards the USA, together with the TH5 fixed towards Europe, and choose between one, other, or both, either at the press of a button or at the click of a mouse. Jesús tells me it's even possible to TX all your power through one antenna, but RX through both, a nice option thought out for trying to work the states but not wanting to miss out on EU calling off the side.

Before getting down to business though, in traditional style Jesús brought some "churros y porras" and we had coffee and churros while chewing the fat a bit! Here's a photo of the two of us getting ready for the station tour:

And with that, seasons greetings to all, may 2013 bring us all lots of sunspots, good DX, and fun contesting!