pa0r - contesting

Breakfast in Madeira, lunch in Lisbon, luggage in Cologne?

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:59:00 +0100

I have never had any problems with my ham radio luggage, not even when I carried 30 kg on a 20 kg ticket, like on this trip to Madeira. The return trip was quiet, boarding the plane to Lisbon on 5:45 local after an uneasy night of sleep.
I had two pieces of luggage. A trolley with the K3 and two laptops, and a sports bag with the power supplies, cables and clothes. The sports bag weighed 18 kg, the trolley with the equipment 13 kg. Check-in was quick, just at the baggage check the trolley came back out of the Xray machine. "Laptop?" said the operator, "please take out". So I took the laptop out of the trolley and put it into a container. "Any other electronics?". "Yes", I said, took the eeePC out and put it with the laptop. The trolley with the K3 then went through the machine without complaints.
The flight to Lisbon, the 5 hour wait in Lisbon and the flight to Amsterdam were quiet, with the planes not more than 25% full.
In Amsterdam the luggage from TP680 arrived at the time the passengers reached the bagage claim room, the first items were already on the belt. This phantastic service can be offered because the foot trip from the arrival terminal is half an hour.
Anyway, the bagage came out, and the sign said "all bagage unloaded" Nothing for PA0R. The next load came, from London Heathrow. No bag for PA0R. The only thing I could do was go hunting for one of the 16 handling agencies for the bagage which would take responsibility for the disaster. After another quest of half an hour I found the office, with two nice young ladies. One of them filled in a form for me, and while we were at it the other one got a telephone call that some of the bagage from TP680 had been rerouted, and was going to be at belt 7 within 5 minutes. I traveled to belt 7 and found my bag already waiting for me on belt 6. Phantastic service! It had a new hand written label, saying things like CHECKED, RECON and LHS (which means Lufthansa).
It had clearly been opened and checked thorougly, I could see that by the inproper way they had tried to repack the power supply of the K3. But nothing was damaged, I only lost an hour of time....

CQWW-CW 2008 contest summary (3X5A missing...)

Call QSOs Zones Cntry hr Score Club
Non-USA M/M HP
HC8N 13394 192 680 48 34,385,576 NCCC
CT9L 11245 577 163 48 24,798,880 RR DX
DF0HQ 9179 175 685 48 14,312,980 RR DX

Call 160m Q/Z/C 80m Q/Z/C 40m Q/Z/C 20m Q/Z/C 15m Q/Z/C 10m Q/Z/C
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HC8N 1115/24/ 81 1924/32/118 3694/36/ 13 3495/40/152 2906/37/141 260/23/51
CT9L 857/23/ 76 1593/28/115 3966/36/128 2975/37/130 1812/28/107 42/11/21
DF0HQ 1200/24/ 90 2326/33/124 3010/38/169 1964/37/149 484/32/106 195/11/47

Equipment used by CT9L

160 & 10m: K2 + ACOM1000
80m: K3 + Expert-1k
40m: K3 + ACOM2000
20m: TS990 + Expert-1k
15m: K3 + HL-1.5kfx

Problems encountered with the equipment

The K2 did not work on the 15m antenna and the ACOM2000. Probably the fault was RF related. Strangely it did work with the
bandfilter switched off. The effect was that when the PTT was dropped the ACOM went to ARC fault. We decided to swap the K2 for a K3, which did not have the problem.

One of the K3's had a fault in the filter control, the DSP bandwidth could not be set. Setting to NORM resulted in a
400 Hz CW bandwidth. The same K3 also had only a 250 Hz roofing filter for CW. This is definitely too narrow to work the pileups efficiently. Fortunately signal strengths on 15 were not extreme so we made it with the 2.8 kHz roofing filter and the 400 hz DSP.

Other observations

The Expert-1k is a nice, fully automatic, amplifier. The only drawback we could find was the HUGE noise made by the fan. You need noise-cancelling headphones when you have this thing sitting on the station table...

Apart from the faulty DSP control in one unit, the K3's appeared to be the right tool for the job. That was the unanimous vote of the group.

Murphy

This was my first contest where Murphy was on vacation. Once we had the stations running we did not have ANY problem, by choosing the right frequency areas in the bands mutual interference was never a real problem. This was also the first time the N1MM software worked without error.

So why did we not win the contest?

I am sure we were in the wrong geographical location. VOAPROP showed duct-like propagation from 3X5A to europe. We could hear D4C and 3X5A working stations on 10 meters, while we could here none of the stations they worked. 15 meters closed 2 hours earlier on CT3 than in 3X. But I am sure considering the circumstances a third place WW is nothing to be ashamed of, just that it did not quite match our expectations. I am sure next year we will do a propagation analysis before we choose a location.

CT9L ready to go

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:19:00 +0100

There are now 3 separate cables running from the house wiring input into the shack, carrying 3 phases of the mains. That is enough to stop the lights from flickering all the time. The crew built an extra vertical fro 10 meters. We don't know if it will be necessary, as Luis, CT3EE told us that 10 meters is dead in CT3. Further south they seem to have a better path into USA, we can hear some stations from EA8 and 3X5 running on 10, and we cannot hear the other end of the pileup. Maybe the contest will bring some propagation? We will know monday morning.At least the sun is shining at the moment!

During the contest I will be on 15 meters running 6 hour shifts together with DL3HAH.

CT9L is ready for it.

Rein CT3/PA0R/P (CS95A)

CS95A is running

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:25:00 +0100

Our pre-contest station is now operating on all bands. Most of the anternnas have been fixed, only thye 40m beam needs some more tuning.

I had a nice run on 160m last night with rates over 100, and 160 soun ds completely different from last year, where we operated from EA8, in the city center of Las Palmas. There the noise from the inverted L was as hign as 10 over 9, and we were completely deaf. Now we can hear signals of S2/S3.

I also did some operating on 15 this morning, and the band sounded o.k. The signals will be quite thin this year....

The wx gets better all the time. No rain today. We are now busy to strengthen the mains wiring of the qth to accommodate the amps.

As of tomorrow morning we will be operating full power as CS95A.

These are DL3QQ, DJ7JC abd DF1AL in the cellar shack operating 10, 20 and 15.....

The other ops are holding siesta after a nice lunch in Santana.

Siesta time

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:56:46 +0100

The whole crew is down with the siesta. The night has been a bit rough for most, and we just had an excellent meal in the main snackbar in the village with big beers and nice red wine. Now it is very quit. DL3QQ is trying to get a winkey2 module running, and DL2AL is giving moral support. The rest of the crew, DJ7IK, DL1XX, DL1XW DJ7JC and DK3QZ are horizontally polarized. The transceivers are running, most of the antennas have been tuned to the CW band. There is some problem with the 40m antennas. Both the beam and the vertical cannot be handled by the4 acom 2000, it gives an ARC error.

With the antenna analyser the swr goes from 2.0 to 5,0, so there is still some work to do. Also the 220V distribution has not yet been changed to accomodate the 5 amplifiers...

It has stopped raining now and the sun comes through, which changes the outside rtemperature to a more normal level. We had a cold night...

Bck to work.... probably by this evening we will be running CS95A until friday nite.

Rein CT3/PA0R

Packing again...

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:37:00 +0100

Today I have made the brand new Elecraft K3 ready for our next venture, the CQWW-CW contest 2008.

This year we have chosen Madeira (CT3) as our battle filed. Last time I was there was in 2004. The crew is the same as last year's succesfull M/2 operation with some additions (more on that later), one of them being Andy, DJ7IK whom I accompanied to Lybia and Tunesia.

The K3 is the ideal contest rig. It is fittet with a 400 Hz roofing filter and keying and rigcontrol can be done via 1 RS232 cable. That cable was a story in itself. According to my new philosophy, 'you don't have to make what you can buy', I had tried to buy a serial extension cable to do the job. Nowhere in town could I buy one. The girl in the largest computer shop of the Netherlands looked at me with compassion. "Well daddy, you are 5 years ouit of time for this... serial cables have been OUT for several years, they don't exist anymore".

O.K., there are times that you have to admit that you are a bit detached from reality. So I found an internet shop wheich still had a few of those old fashioned cables in stock, and ordered 2 (you never know)... Delivery time 2 working days, so just in time for the trip.

The cables were delivered nicely in time (of course we were away shopping in Belgium when they came, but most delivery crew know that they must put the stuff into the wooden shoe at the back door when we are not at home). The cable connects to the laptop o.k., but I had a problem with the female connector for the K3. The K3 male connector has 2 protruding nuts, the same type of nut the female connector has, so they just don't fit together...

So we had to go back to the old workshop, with screwdrivers, stanley knives and metal saws. When we had cut off the plastic from the connector we saw that that the nut was bolted to the connector. Moreover this was also the connection that held the metal shield of the connector.

The only way out was a visit to the junk box... find an old female connector and fit it to the new cable.

Now I have rigctl working, and also CW. Strangely enough, PTT does not work. I does not return to inactive after the first time it is switched on. This does work ok with the USB cable. Strange.... Fortunately the VOX circuit of the K3 takes this lightly. It has to be ON anyway for the internal keyer to work.

Do I need to mention I also packed the old parallel interface? You never know....

Back from EA8

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 13:55:00 +0100

I arrived home safely after a 14 hour trip. Most of that time was spent waiting. 1 hour 30 minutes in a road block in Las Palmas on the way to the airport in the morning, 1 more hour on Las Palmas airport, almost 3 hours on the plane to Madrid, 6 hours on Barajas airport, two hours 50 minutes flight to Amsterdam. Not to forget the 1 1/2 hour drive home.

Looking back at the operation we can be quite satisfied with the results. Working in the multi/multi class we made almost 10k qsos and almost 20 Million points. The location in the city of Las Palmas turned out to be sub-optimal for multiband contesting. Especially 160 meters , where I spent almost 8 hours was bad, if not impossible to operate. We ended up listening on the 20 meters quad radiator, and even then only the big guns could be heard. Many thanks to those who took the time to contact us using the 'callsign guessing procedure'.

20 and 15 were good, 40 reasonable and 80 mediocre. 10 meters was hardly open from our location at EA8URL.

600 meters higher than our location EF8A was working multi/2, and some test contacts before the contest showed that they were at least 10 dB stronger than us on all bands, resulting in a score of over 30 Million...

After the contest we were able to visit them, and we could see why. This mountain top station is a professional job, and they will certainly be a force to reckon with in the years to come!

Anyway, we had loads of fun, and the team proved to be excellent. I am looking forward to next year's CQWW-CW...

Rein PA0R

The virtues of CW contesting (who needs fieldday?).

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:10:00 +0100

I am writing this in one of the shacks of EA8URL in Las Palmas. We (DK3QZ, DLiEMH, DK3QQ, DL3KAH, DL5XX and myself) are planning to operate the CQWW-CW from this QTH. At this moment 3 of the 4 stations are ready (including the computers) and all antennas work except that the 20 meter quad has a broken reflector, the 10 meters 4-el monobander is tuned to 27.4 MHz and we still need to build a dipole for 160m.
But we still have 3 days to go and the weather is nothing like at home. Day temperature is a solid 24 degrees, which goes down to 22 degrees during the night. It is really nice to make a morning stroll down the beach before breakfast, and eat out on the beach in your t-shirt while your xyl is putting another log onto the fire at home.

Had a nice run on 17m yesterday afternoon for one and a half hours, the first eQSL has already arrived. I am curious what the long band antennas do. Maybe we need to put up some receive anatennas. Until now it looks like the qrm at this down town hilltop qth is reasonable.

We are now assembling a second 10 meter yagi. We don't know the distance between the elements, so better go look in the library (the URL is well equipped with books). Today the highworker which has been promised to come 'manana' for the last 3 days will come to enable the repairs.

Must hurry....

Rein EA8/PA0R

5A7A, the aftermath...

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:45:00 +0100

Thursday, November 30. .

7:30 Breakfast. We have been packing last night and the truck which will take our bagage to the airport will come 8:30, Insh Allah.... We will get our passports back at the hotel desk when we return the key to our room. The bus will pick us up around 9:00.

8:00 I have my passport, with a nice visum and plenty of stamps. Nothing can stop us from going home now.

8:30 No truck...

9:00 No truck, no bus. We wait outside,the weather is sunny again.

10:30 The bus arrives and we have to pack all stuff in the bus as the truck won't come.

11:15 We arrive at the airport. We unload the bus and find enough bagage carts to wheel everything into the departure hall. First bagage check, everything goes through the Xray scanner.

11:35 We put all stuff together in the arrival hall. Andy collects all tickets to check us in as a group, as we would completely block the check in counter.... We wait. The plane is leaving 14:10, so we have plenty of time. I am starting to get hungry, but where we are there is nothing we can buy. We change our money back into Euros.

11:50 We get our boarding tickets. Lufthansa opens a special counter for the bagage and it works out fine...

12:00 The bagage is on its way to the plane. We gather our hand luggage and proceed to customs for a passport check. We merge into the queue.

12:10 Mitch,VE6OH shows his passport. The customs officer looks at it, and types the name into a terminal. He tells Mitch to "wait a few minutes" and puts the passport aside. Mitch looks irritated and waits.

12:15 It is my turn. Mitch is still waiting a few minutes. The guy types my name into the terminal and says: "wait a few minutes" and puts my passport aside. I wait too.

12:20 Adriano, ON5GA joins us.

12:26 Franz, DK1II joins us. We now form an awkward block for the queue. The other expedition members have taken the other queue and wave at us. "We won't leave without you", Andy jokes. Mustapha tells us it is probably our own fault, we should not have harassed the customs people. I am not aware of any harassment. The customs guy asks us to sit down but there are no chairs.

12:45 I ask the guy what happens. He says something like "name check". Obviously he does not speak any language other than arabic. Meanwhile 4 seats are empty and we sit down and wait.

13:40 First call to board the plane to Frankfurt. We try to talk to the customs guys but nobody will tell us anything. We don't know what is wrong. We need an interpreter but nobody there who can help us. This is getting scary. We have no passport, and any policeman can put us in jail for that. Adriano has a connecting flight in Frankfurt and his bagage is checked through to Brussels. We don't fancy spending another day in Libia, and certainly not in this airport.

13:55 Last call for the plane to Frankfurt. We try to communicate with anybody in customs, but we have no luck. Haytem, an operator of the 5A1A club station appears. He talks arabic to customs and into his phone. He tells us to be patient.

14:10 We don't know if the plane has left. Haytem has disappeared again. Nobody tells us anything. We wait, there is nothing else we can do. If the plane leaves without us I will have to call home that I won't come and they will be scared too.

14:25 The Lufthansa station manager appears. He is on the phone to someone and tells us that the plane is still there, but it will not wait longer than 20 minutes after scheduled departure. And no, they won't have to unload the bagage as we havechecked in as a group.

14:35 We get thumbs up... The station manager tells us that somebody has given the green light for us to leave.

He explains that if your name is on a certain list, the terminal will go yellow when the guy types your name. And then there is endless checking and phoning, and we are lucky someone has given a green light.

14:40 I am the last one to get my passport stamped. We run to the Xray machine. Franz is still there, he has a radio in his hand luggage. My 2 laptops get through without problems. We run to gate 7. The door of the plane closes behind us.

14:45 The plane starts moving, we made it out....

We still don't know what happened. There was no explanation, and no apoligies. The secret service has had our names month ahead of the expedition.They have followed our steps metaculously during our stay. They have reported our every move during our operation. So why this 'monkey theatre'? I think Lybia is just not there yet, and despite all friendly speeches about peace and friendship ("you are always welcome here") I won't come back until the country is civilized. In other words, to me Lybia still sucks...

5A7A, qso target reached

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 07:50:00 +0100

Tuesday 28, 8:30. We just broke the 100.000 qso barrier. Yuki is on 20 meters SSB for JA and Andy,DJ7IK is working some US stations on 80 SSB.

The crew will start dismantling most of the antennas today, and we will go on running with 3 stations until tomorrow morning. Weather has gone worse. We had to close down the station temporarily because of thunderstorms last night. And the next days are supposed to be rainy, just in time for the antenna work outside.

Meanwhile I will be checking the contest log and uploading the rest of the 100k qso's to the online log. Yesterday's batch (some 36.000 q's) did not make in into the online log, so we try again this morning.

After switching back to the free dxpedition version of Win-test I am back into the routine of restarting programs on the various computers. This version of Win-test is crap. I don't understand how the authors of the program could release it in this state. (I will report on our experience with Win-test separately).

I hope we will get our passports back which were taken away from us when we got into the country....

CQWWDX CW, the day after

noreply@blogspirit.com (PA0R) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 09:25:00 +0100

Well, it is done, finito!! We more than reached our goals in the contest, being 40 Million points. We have 17000 qso's in the contest log and a raw score of 46 Million!!! We will have to wait a bit to find out if it is enough for a first place in the M/M category.

It is rather quiet in the main shack. Most of the crew are on a trip to Tripolis. Yuki is running Japanese stations on 20 SSB like a machine gun.Andy, DL9USA is on 17 CW and Ruth IT9ESZ and Adriano, ON5GA are heating up 40m SSB.
The going qso rate is over 400.

We still need some 9500 qso's until we reach the 100k qso goal for the expedition, and it looks like we are going to make it.

Back to log checking...