Topband: directional receive and contests

[Tim Shoppa]

At home I use a foot switches to cycle between three receive antennas after
each 160M CQ: NE and SW on a K9AY loop, and WNW on a west-facing pennant.
Each antenna is fairly broad in the forward direction although they have
deep deep nulls in the backwards direction. Oftentimes 8's will come in
best on the NE direction of the K9AY, but W0's and especially W6's/W7's
come in best on the west-facing pennant.

Cycling through on the foot switches is really very nice. I could not
imagine doing it any other way in a contest that has domestic callers, it
lets me type and use super check partial very effectively. For a more
DX-oriented contest pushbutton (finger) selection works OK but I don't
think that works well for a domestic contest.

Very occasionally I will also switch to listening to the transmit antenna
(do not have a footswitch for that). Usually the carribean comes in fine on
my SW receive antenna, but there have been a few occasions for Africa,
south atlantic, etc.,, when I could only copy on the transmit antenna.

Tim N3QE

On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 11:47 AM, Art Snapper <art at nk8x.net> wrote:

> Do any of you wish to share your methodology on using directional receive
> antennas during a run?
>
> The inverted-L was way too noisy with the lightning static, to hear weak
> and distant stations.
>
> On the other hand, I am sure I missed some stations, by being on the
> wrong-direction receiving antenna at the time they called.
>
> de Art NK8X
>
> ᐧ
> _________________
> Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband