THE HAMRADIO DOT COM

It is funny that CQWW sends emails via personal gmail-account. This is what I received from Bob Cox:

Dear Fellow contester,
Many of you do not subscribe to the contest reflector or CQ magazine and you may have missed our public announcement. The CQ WW Contest Committee would like to inform you via this news letter that the ASSISTED CATEGORY award program has been greatly expanded.

• We announce the strengthening of the assisted awards program. Starting with the 2010 CQ WW contests, the assisted category award program will be greatly expanded.
• All Low Power and QRP assisted entrants will be specifically listed and eligible for awards as is already the case for unassisted entries.
• A band-by-band breakdown for all band assisted World, Europe and USA will be provided within the 2010 results.
• Lastly, the number of plaques available to assisted entrants will be increased to include Europe Assisted All Band and all World Assisted Single Bands.
• We hope that this action provides an incentive for entrants using a QSO spotting system to join the assisted category.
  Please make a note that the log submission deadline for SSB has changed to Nov 21, 2010 and for CW to Dec 21, 2010.
  73,
  Bob, K3EST
  CQ WW Director

Good amount of sunspots just before CQWW SSB Contest:

http://www.solen.info/solar/

Solar Terrestrial Activity Report by Jan Alvestad has been my favourite solar information page for years.

Title: CQ WW 2010 Update

Date: Sunday, October 24
Time: 19:00 UTC (3 PM EDT)
Registration (free): https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/934904682
Or go to www.pvrc.org and click the Upcoming Webinars link

CQ WW DX Contest Director Bob Cox K3EST and committee members John Dorr, K1AR and Doug Zwiebel, KR2Q will provide an update on the 2010 CQ WW SSB & CW DX contests. A Q&A session will follow the presentation. The event is hosted by the Potomac Valley Radio Club (PVRC).

Never heard of a Webinar or are not quite sure what it is? Wikipedia defines it as:
“ Web conferencing used to conduct live meetings, training, or presentations via the Internet. In a Web conference, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet. This can be either a downloaded application on each of the attendees computers or a web-based application where the attendees access the meeting by clicking on a link distributed by e-mail (meeting invitation) to enter the conference.” Audio is provided via your PC speakers or headphones. If you have never attended a contesting Webinar, make it a point to join your fellow contesters from around the world for this special event. It really is a cool way for the global contest community to meet and participate in topics of mutual interest. New attendees can view a short user’s guide at http://www.pvrc.org/webinar/quick_ref.pdf Questions, comments, etc. can be sent to k4zw@comcast.net

Ken K4ZW

Last weekend we operated at Scandinavian Activity Contest SSB as OH1F in multi-multi class. It was pleasure to operate with all my best contest friends from the past. Propagation was not very good and we had some problems with antenna directions (!). Hopefully our score was enough to #1 in M/M class anyway.

Scandinavian Activity Contest, SSB

Call: OH1F
Operator(s): OH1LWZ, OH1TM, OH1NOA, OH3WW, OH1RX, OH1MM, OH5DX
Station: OH1AF

Class: M/M HP
QTH: Pori
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
——————-
80: 302 41
40: 765 71
20: 1005 80
15: 362 69
10: 20 8
——————-
Total: 2452 269 Total Score = 1,503,979

I had a quite busy radio weekend – in a bit over 24 hours I participated in seven different radio contests! I was operating from our club station and used our club calls OH1AF, OH1AB and OH1F. These were the contests:

ARRL EME Contest
My first EME contest ever! I have previously worked some EME qsos with WSJT JT65B mode and ARRL EME contest should provide lots of activity. At our club we have 2 x 15 element yagis at 45 meters and 500 watts HA8UG VHF linear amplifier. This is enough to work at least the biggest EME stations. Antennas have no elevation rotator, so it is only possible to work stations before moonset or after moonrise. During the weekend I had three possible openings, windows, to work EME qsos. In the first window I didn’t get any qsos, in the second worked RK3FG and UA3PTW and then finally in the last moonset during the last 15 minutes I got IK3MAC (booming signal, no suprise), EA2AGZ and Mr. WSJT himself K1JT. Five qsos was less I was hoping for, but I am not very experienced EME operator yet. Unfortunately next EME contest is same time than CQWW SSB Contest.

EU Sprint SSB
EU Sprint seems to lost all activity. I started on 20m and had work almost everyone in 15 minutes. Propagation to Europe wasn’t so good either. So after some qsos I quitted to work later few contacts on 40 and 80 meters. See my posting to 3830-reflector.

California QSO Party
This is very big and active QSO party. Propagation was good enough to work some Californian stations on 20 meters and then after sleeping few hours also on 40 meters in the time of sunrise. See my posting to 3830-reflector.

Oceania Contest SSB
In this contest you work only stations from Oceania. It means mainly VKs and ZLs, but also some YBs, DUs and rare DXs like V85, 9M6, KH0 … Propagation to Oceania was excellent with 15 meters widely open. I even worked loud VK4KW on 10 meters and heard another VK there. In the morning VKs and ZLs were loud on 40 meters long path many hours after sunrise. See my posting to 3830-reflector. Just after contest I heard NH7O on 15 meters SSB …. via long path! South Europeans worked also JAs on 10 meters on Sunday.

DTC – German Telegraphy Contest
This is 80/40m CW only contest. Never worked this one before. And now just made a handful of contacts for fun. I even worked loud NP4Z on 40 meters.

RSGB 21/28 MHz Contest
This is a very old and classic contest. I think they have changed the weekend. I had very poor propagation to UK and worked only 3 stations. GM3WOJ was lonely one on 15m SSB.

SRAL Peruskisa SSB
This Finnish domestic contest has four different classes: “Novice” class (in Finnish the name of this license is “base class” and another one is “general class”) for beginners, Second operator class, General class and Club station class. I took part in club comptetion and decided to use a rare club call OH1AB. Contest lasts 60 minutes and has four 15-minutes periods. I worked some 80 qsos. Now I have to think what to do with my paperlogs.

The radio club PI4THT at the University of Twente has really interesting WebSDR on nine bands. In contrast to other web-controlled receivers, this receiver can be tuned by multiple users simultaneously, thanks to the use of Software-Defined Radio.

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

In the beginning of September WPX Contest Committee sent out a survey to 8144 WPX contest participants. Now survey results are out. Interesting question was “Should the Single Operator and Single Operator Assisted categories be combined into one Single Operator category?”. 41.1% said yes, 45.8% answered no.

The full results of this survey are here:

http://www.cqwpx.com/blog/?p=69