[UK-CONTEST] Contest experience

[Dave H]

I've access to a QTH /GW occasionally and here's my experience  this weekend
- perhaps something of use to others/newbies to contesting.

I looked up to see what contests were on this weekend and digimodes a
preference especially in holiday QTH!  The DMC 24hour rtty looked good - so
took along some gear.

I've an FT817, a homemade 20 meter dipole, a fishing rod-thing, a Toshiba
Celeron 300 laptop running W98, a psu some cables paper logbook and test
gear .. all sorted to go.

I booted the laptop before I went and dropped the contest DLL into the MixW
- all was well.

When setting up the station on site after a few mins use of MixW it
page-faulted and despite reboots kept doing it. Luckily I had alternatives
MMTTY was most promising - I was stuck on 20m but that was ok. I always keep
a selection of applications on the HDD to install.

I was fitting contest operation inbetween everything else, but while
operating noticed strangeness jittery operation of W98 / MMTTY which must
have confused some stations as I took so much time getting back to them.  I
did a control-alt-del and checked what was running, there was a few things
which it would do without. So killed them all.  It wasn't the easiest
operating conditions, compounded with the clock losing about 10mins in an
hour! I had a mobile phone and kept the paper version with correct times.

My actual contest work (not a great) total of 21 contacts to East and West
Europe  (Russia, Ukraine, EU) .  As usual I learned plenty about what to do
and hope to make things better next time.

My concern was the laptop (a Toshiba 4030CDT) which I have never come across
such bad loss of time - I know it was talking to the radio (to get freq) as
well I decoding / encoding rtty but I wasn't running anything else at the
time. (I even killed Sophos antivirus & the wireless networking for the
duration).  I'll have to find a better alternative next time, certainly w98.

The other thing to watch was - while packing away the antenna the smallest
section of fishing rod managed to get stuck between two other larger
sections and cracked the one when extracting it.

-
73s de Dave
G0CER
G6VSG
http://www.eQSL.cc/Member.cfm?G0CER