[UK-CONTEST] BARTG report... and an MMTTY question

[Ian White, G3SEK]

This contest just *had* to fall on the two days that remind you how Mad 
March got its name!

I decided to do SO40m since that's the band on which my vertical is 
least un-competitive. It's very strong and guyed at the top, so normally 
I add something extra on top to improve the performance a bit - but not 
this weekend. More a case of "Don't even look at it."

Finished with 365 scoring QSOs x 67 countries/areas x 6 continents, in 
not too many operating hours (Friday and Sunday evenings playing music 
in two excellent pub sessions - at least as important as the contest 
:-)

The opening session of the contest, through to Saturday mid-morning, 
accounted for about half the QSOs, and all six continent mults. However, 
after all continents are safely in the bag, the BARTG rules don't 
particularly favour DX contacts - a weak W in a call area you've already 
worked is worth no more than a strong DL. It then turned into a bit of a 
CQ-fest to hoover up the casuals. Seemed like the Russian CW test had 
depleted the numbers from eastern Europe, and I couldn't dip very far 
into the pool of Ws.

To while away the idle hour... several of them... I experimented with a 
second PC running a second MMTTY on the sub-rx audio feed. Not quite 
SO2R, more like SO1.5R because only the main PC can control the 
transceiver, but still quite useful both for tuning the band between 
CQs, and for using a different MMTTY demodulator setups on the same weak 
signal. Now that second use raises a question...

As expected, there was essentially no difference between MMTTY's various 
demodulators on strong signals, and the differences on weak signals were 
not clear-cut: sometimes one demod would catch a callsign or a vital 
figures-shift that the other one had missed, and sometimes the other way 
around. I suppose this is to be expected, since we're working on 
statistical margins - but contest preparation is all about shifting the 
odds in your favour, right?

So here's the question: does anyone have setups for MMTTY demodulators 
that they find particularly effective under contesting conditions, 
please? Alternatively, are there any recommendations for particularly 
effective hardware demodulators?


Since the two PCs were both running WriteLog, just out of interest I 
also tried networking them... and was very glad of it. During the worst 
of the wind there were quite a few momentary mains dropouts that were 
always threatening to reboot the main PC, so it was very comforting to 
see each new QSO appear instantly in the battery-backed log on the 
laptop. The only need for re-syncing logs was due to my own finger 
trouble, and WL just got on and did it. Even for SO1R, I'll certainly 
use networking again in future.



-- 
73 from Ian G3SEK