CQ Worldwide VHF Contest - 2019
Call: K2DRH
Operator(s): K2DRH
Station: K2DRH
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: EN41 IL
Operating Time (hrs):
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 524 157
2: 101 44
-------------------
Total: 625 201 Total Score = 145,926
Club: Society of Midwest Contesters
Comments:
The contest started with a bang and I had 3 really good hours of 6M Es that kept
moving around, 1st to FL and the SE, then the MidAtlantic then the NE with a
little TX and points west thrown in from time to me. I was glad that I had 4
antenna direction choices (besides the rotatable arrays I have single yagis
fixed on TX and FL. I ignored the DX unless it came up in my pileup (and
several did). It was steady but it moved around very fast and quickly, more
than normal. It kept coming in and out again for the next few hours but the
rates fell quite a bit. It was amusing to see FT8 signals saturating the small
segment while I was working good rate. I did see FT4 while I was running but I
didn’t work it, and when the rate fell off so did FT4 and the action seemed to
all be on FT8. I heard about the 2M Es, but the hot spots were all too close
over my head and I didn’t luck into any.
In the past when the rate would fall on 6M I would get “locals” in my pileup
out to 300 miles or so. Well that didn’t happen as much, but I could see them
all on 6M FT8 (and a few on FT4, but very few). So I worked them FT8 and QSYed
them to 2 when I could. More seem to be aware and responding to that now –
but hate it when they just send me LATER since that almost always means NEVER.
Luckily a lot more are using FT8 on 2M (I saw no FT4) and I made a lot of good
mults there. It’s still really frustrating though since SSB is so much
quicker.
Ping Jockey was less populated at night than during the June contest however,
and few were posting CQs there per the CQWW VHF rules. There were fewer signals
on the call freqs too. Glad I made some skeds before the contest. The morning
was better populated and the rox were really flying. I had more skeds and there
were a lot of call freq CQs on 6 and 2M so it was pretty busy. Sunday was not a
good day for Es here at all, but there were a few pockets from time to time with
no real rate. FT8 really did well for these but it was slow going. I lucked
into a brief opening to TX when a lot of stations were on FT4 but soon worked
them out. Had an opening to FL and the NE towards the end. Both were very loud
but very sparsely populated while FT8 was still buzzing. Normally I can really
feed when it opens to the NE, but sadly it was really thin.
For the first time in a long time nothing significant broke since the last
contest in June! I set up a VHF station for the club on FD and a lot of stuff
was pulled out but it was relatively easy to put back together. We did FT8 on
HF and 6M during FD but never got N1MM talking to WSJTX the right way to
automatically log those QSOs. So the goal was to do that for this contest.
This became even more urgent when WSJTX with “full functional” FT4 designed
for fast contesting was suddenly released a few days before the contest, making
auto logging highly desirable to get the most out of it. WSJT-X still has a few
bugs in the GUI, but seems to do pretty well on FT4.
With the Flex 6700 it’s easy to open two panadapters and set up separate
slice’s (VFO’s) to monitor CW/SSB on both 6M and 2M like an A/B VFO on two
bands and have those connect directly to N1MM Plus Logger in a SO2R RX setup and
quickly change bands to run stations. A third panadapter can then contain two
more slices for 6M FT8 and FSK144. Three panadapters fill a full screen without
doubling up. Now a fifth slice was needed to monitor and use FT4 while keeping
the others open to check for activity. There is a lot more action on 6M digital
than 2M, although 2M FT8 is coming of age and 2M FSK is essential for more
distant multipliers. Another panadapter and two more slices. The screen gets
pretty busy pretty fast but now Flex can connect to a second client computer to
provide more space and processor power so things can be redistributed. It’s
also pretty complicated and a house of cards waiting to topple. I had many
program reboots.
These slices are relatively easy to program to talk to WSJT and you can run
multiple instances of WSJT to monitor and switch to as many different digital
watering holes as you have monitors and computer power for, even on different
computers not acting a radio clients since everything connects together to the
radio via Ethernet with virtual COM ports and DAX (digital audio exchange).
However N1MM will only connect to two slices for SO2R quick band changes and
audio monitoring control with two entry windows, one for each band. If you want
to auto log from WSJT-X you have to connect one of these slices to WSJT within
N1MM with a totally different CAT setup in parallel with your SO2R CAT. That
turned out to be a real PITA and very prone to crashes and glitches. Apparently
there are internal conflicts that are not readily apparent to the average
non-computer genius.
They also hint that it may be possible to run WSJT as a stand-alone and still
connect to N1MM to auto log, but then tell you that you are on your own figuring
that out. Good luck. And although there seems to be an option in the setup
screens to connect a second slice to a second instance of WSJT-X through N1MM,
however networking with a couple of other Flex owners yielded no success in
making that work either. And the one slice it does connect to has no easy way
to switch back to logging SSB/CW with the WSJT program window still open to
monitor, so it shuts it down. Worse there is no way to connect to as many
slices as one would like to be functional to simultaneously monitor all the
digital watering holes on two bands. It’s the wild wild West out here in Ham
computer land!
I semi solved it (at least for now) by networking another computer with N1MM and
dedicated it to digital mode logging and running FT4. FT8 and MSK144 screens
were on another computer and still logged by hand in the main SO2R running
computer. It’s not ideal but it works and operating FT8 gives you a lot of
time. It really doesn’t matter what mode you log since the contest is not
mode specific anyway, but it would be useful to get a breakdown. I did roughly
150 Qs on digital modes. Your results may vary.
As it turns out the vast and fast runs of FT4 were not forthcoming anyway. I
made maybe 25 contacts and some had to be manually logged since not all of them
could be made on the dedicated slice. I also used that auto log slice for FT8
when I was doing a lot of that, but it would hang up on some report “detail”
if the other station was not in contest mode. WSJT provided a window to correct
it that would pop up in some obscure place on the screen. It didn’t seem to
work worth a darn and refused to log it (or respond to anything else) without
some nebulous info that I never could seem to provide it. So it got canceled
and logged manually otherwise it was all full stop with no way to fix it.
On FT8 (and one on FT4) there are still a lot of stations not running contest
mode, and that would be OK if everyone was using real WSJTX, since it recognizes
and compensates for this. But the derivative programs like JTDX don’t even
have NA contest mode. Some were apparently manually inserting TEST into their
CQs to make it look like it had contest mode, then failing to auto sequence on a
contest mode TX3. And of course the operators also failed to actually operate
and correct this. Several times I had to remove the R EN41 part of TX 3 and sub
in R-01 (or some number report) since they would send me a numerical TX2 report
repeatedly instead of the NA contest TX2. As soon as I sent the “standard”
TX3 they went right to RRR or RR73.
73 de Bob2
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