[CQ-Contest] The New Radio - an audio and visual approach to contesting

[Peter Voelpel]

It was exactly my idea to work the CQ WWWDX SSB SB20m with my SDR-1000 as I
learnt what this radio is able to provide.
When I started the contest it worked quite nicely for me, and by 13:00Z I
obtained 103 countries and 29 Zones, mostly by S&P and a 2 hours run into
Asia.
Finding new rare mults were so easy! I could see new pileups immediately and
only needed to click the mouse onto it.
Strategy was to work as many mults as possible the first day, run the US in
the afernoon and run only the next day, search for new mults when US runs
drop below a 60q/hr.
When I turned the rotatable antenna to the US in the afternoon and added the
lower US 2-stack I was shocked by tremendeous qrm and could not find any run
frequency.
Finally I started to run but had a hard time right from the beginning.
When a new station started qrm 500Hz above I was going to tell him qsy but
could not read the station, it was LSB!
All stations were audible in USB and LSB, LSB a lot less signal strength but
still loud.
What happened? The image of the low IF of 9kHz was not good enough rejected,
so all stations were twice on the band 18Khz apart.
First I started trouble shooting at the soundboard-radio connections but
everxthing looked allright.

Later I learned that image rejection needs recalibration when moving across
the band. Only after calibration it is good enough not to cause
interference.
Before that I gave up, was really tired of all that noise on 20m and also
physically tired as I did not sleep from Friday to Saturday.

I will use the radio again in one of the next contests, I do like the
panadapter and the filtering the dsp can provide compared to my analog Icom
transceivers.
I have also used the radio during normal activity on the bands without
problems.
Next time I will keep a signal generator ready for the recalibration, it´s
possible to reach 80db rejection, but without it I will be lost again.

73
Peter


 


José Nunes CT1BOH wrote:
>>>>> The New Radio – an audio and visual approach to contesting
>>>>>           
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> There is a trend in the new SDR radios that incorporates spectrum 
> scopes (panadapter, waterfall, etc). This trend will change the way we 
> operate and will impact the way we do Contesting.
>
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> The new way of operating is:
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>    1. completely eliminate the VFO knob and tune with a mouse and keyboard
>    keys
>    2. use both ears and eyes to identify stations
>    3. have visual information of the totality of the signals on a band
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> "The new radio" offers the visual element, along side the audio 
> element and the ability to tune from one signal into the next signal 
> without having to listen to the empty band space in between stations.
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> This will have a tremendous impact in the way we Contest, and will 
> accelerate activity, i.e. more QSOs in the time frame of the contest, 
> because tuning is many orders of magnitude faster. In a way we can say 
> that with the "new radio" there is no more Search&Pounce but only Pounce.