Southern California Contest Club
CQ WPX CW: May 25-26 ARRL June VHF Contest June 8-10 All Asian DX Contest, CW June 15-16
CQ WPX CW: May 25-26 ARRL June VHF Contest June 8-10 All Asian DX Contest, CW June 15-16
A Collection of Old SCCC News Stories (Newest to Oldest)
Monthly News (SCCCORE)
April 2019
Welcome aboard to new member Paul, W6PNG (pictured left). Paul is located in Laguna Beach. Paul has been active of late in SOTA and NPOTA activations, which has led to suitcase DXpeditons, as he calls them. While he is antenna impaired at his home QTH, he is able to get on for contesting from other locations. He did ARRL DX Phone for the second consective year from TI7 for example. He was also interviewed by Eric 4Z1UG on QSO Today. Welcome Paul!
Also, welcome to NI6V. Matthew is in Long Beach and enjoys CW, RTTY and QRP. He too is antenna challenged at his home QTH but he will be purchasing an Elecraft KX3 and Buddipole so that he can go portable.
We are hams. Amateur radio operators. Radio guys. As such, we use batteries. Probably more than the average person. Certainly we have more of an interest than most in how batteries work, how to properly charge them, and how to prolong their life. Battery University has all sorts of information on batteries. You'll find chapters under "Crash Course on Batteries," "Battery Types," "Battery Testing and Monitoring," and "How to Prolong Battery Life," among others on the site. There is a plethora of interesting material there. There is even a fascinating section called "Charging Without Wires -- A Solution or Laziness." Most of us are familiar with the basic concept but this chapter provides some interesting information on the topic. Battery University is a good place to learn a lot about batteries.
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The following story has been added April 2, after the original publishing date of the April News (SCCCORE).
Congratulations to Team Exuberance, a group of youngsters including our own Levi, K6JO! The group, with the support of many amateur radio operators nationwide via a GoFundMe page, traveled to the K3LR superstation in Pennsylvania to try their hand at the CQ WPX SSB contest the final weekend of March. While these youngsters are not new to contesting, they don't have the many years of experience that many of us in the club have. Tim, station owner of K3LR, provided some great coaching, according to the team, and their claimed score benefited from that as well as their own recent contest experiences. According to their 3830scores.org submission, the team scored nearly 23.8 million points and is currently listed in first place in the M/2 HP category! Congratulations to all of them for a superb outing! Photos and more from this effort can be found on the K3LR web site.
Reminder, we are always on the look out for photos of your station, antennas, and portable or expeditions. Also member web sites and award photos. We also have a For sale/wanted section here on the web site.
The results of the September, 2018 NA Sprint SSB have been published. Marko, N5ZO placed 3rd. NX6T operated by KK6NON (now K6JO) placed 10th. The SCCC #1 team placed 6th. Full results can be found here.
Preliminary NAQP RTTY results of the February, 2019 edition have been published by NCJ. SCCC #1 scratched and clawed its way to an 11th place finish. Not our best showing. Conditions were mighty punk on that weekend. Read the article here.
Preliminary results of the 2019 ARRL DX Contest CW have been published by the ARRL. You can read them by clicking here.
Last November 6, the on-set station of the television show "Last Man Standing" (licensed as KA6LMS, get it? LMS...Last Man Standing) was put on the air during a break in taping at Studio City. Special guest operators KN4AQ, KD4ACW and W0DHG took turns operating the station. Also, youngster Jet Jurgensmeyer who plays Boyd on the show spent some time operating along side KN4AQ. Jet had a good time, and expressed an interest in getting his ham license. In this video, Jet looks and sounds like a natural at the mic. Perhaps we can interest him in contesting once he gets his license! The show Last Man Standing airs Fridays at 8:00 pm on Fox. Do any of you find yourself checking the QSLs on the wall of the station while watching the show? I always look to see whose cards and calls I recognize!
The WPX SSB contest was concluded this past weekend (Mar 30-31). Conditions were pretty punk at this point in the sunspot cycle. 10 meters opened for a brief time Sunday morning. And 15 was only slightly less evasive. However, the fun thing about WPX contests is that they are a mixture of DX and USA contacts, keeping things interesting and the strategy a bit different than other contests. With the plethora of USA call sign prefixes out there, multipliers are plentiful. The CW version of WPX occurs in late May.
Strange but true...
The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache on a standard playing card.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
Congratulations to Team Exuberance, a group of youngsters including our own Levi, K6JO! The group, with the support of many amateur radio operators nationwide via a GoFundMe page, traveled to the K3LR superstation in Pennsylvania to try their hand at the CQ WPX SSB contest the final weekend of March. While these youngsters are not new to contesting, they don't have the many years of experience that many of us in the club have. Tim, station owner of K3LR, provided some great coaching, according to the team, and their claimed score benefited from that as well as their own recent contest experiences. According to their 3830scores.org submission, the team scored nearly 23.8 million points and is currently listed in first place in the M/2 HP category! Congratulations to all of them for a superb outing! Photos and more from this effort can be found on the K3LR web site.
Reminder, we are always on the look out for photos of your station, antennas, and portable or expeditions. Also member web sites and award photos. We also have a For sale/wanted section here on the web site.
The results of the September, 2018 NA Sprint SSB have been published. Marko, N5ZO placed 3rd. NX6T operated by KK6NON (now K6JO) placed 10th. The SCCC #1 team placed 6th. Full results can be found here.
Preliminary NAQP RTTY results of the February, 2019 edition have been published by NCJ. SCCC #1 scratched and clawed its way to an 11th place finish. Not our best showing. Conditions were mighty punk on that weekend. Read the article here.
Preliminary results of the 2019 ARRL DX Contest CW have been published by the ARRL. You can read them by clicking here.
Last November 6, the on-set station of the television show "Last Man Standing" (licensed as KA6LMS, get it? LMS...Last Man Standing) was put on the air during a break in taping at Studio City. Special guest operators KN4AQ, KD4ACW and W0DHG took turns operating the station. Also, youngster Jet Jurgensmeyer who plays Boyd on the show spent some time operating along side KN4AQ. Jet had a good time, and expressed an interest in getting his ham license. In this video, Jet looks and sounds like a natural at the mic. Perhaps we can interest him in contesting once he gets his license! The show Last Man Standing airs Fridays at 8:00 pm on Fox. Do any of you find yourself checking the QSLs on the wall of the station while watching the show? I always look to see whose cards and calls I recognize!
The WPX SSB contest was concluded this past weekend (Mar 30-31). Conditions were pretty punk at this point in the sunspot cycle. 10 meters opened for a brief time Sunday morning. And 15 was only slightly less evasive. However, the fun thing about WPX contests is that they are a mixture of DX and USA contacts, keeping things interesting and the strategy a bit different than other contests. With the plethora of USA call sign prefixes out there, multipliers are plentiful. The CW version of WPX occurs in late May.
Strange but true...
The king of hearts is the only king without a moustache on a standard playing card.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
Monthly News (SCCCORE)
March 2019
Welcome aboard to new member Paul, K6PO. Paul hails from San Diego and enjoys CW and RTTY contesting. We are looking forward to having Paul's scores added to the club scores in coming contests!
Also, welcome to new member Roy, KK6M. Roy recently purchased an Elecraft K3S and is really enjoying it. He also has a Yaesu FT5000MP that he loves. Roy is looking to improve his CW contesting skills, and racked up 170 Q's in last month's ARRL DX CW contest. The picture to the left is Roy's well equipped station.
And welcome to Gary, KK6YB from La Jolla, CA. Gary enjoys HF, VHF, UHF, FT8 and RTTY. He was first licensed in 1972.
And...welcome aboard to another new member, Joe, W6AYC in Atascadero. Joe tells us that CW contesting is his speciality.
A recent note from Jim, N6TJ brought to my attention that this month, he is celebrating 70 years of contesting! And this is his ninth decade in the contesting fray! Wow! Jim is planning on operating as 9K2HN in CQWW CW in Zone 21 this November, another new one for him. Jim perennially turns in very high scores in CQWW, and judging by the antennas seen in the 9K2HN QRZ.com photo, he will do so again this November! KB, Jim and congrats on the contesting anniversary!
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There is still time to donate to Team Exuberance and their CQ WPX SSB effort in late March. As you may recall from an earlier SCCCORE writeup, the team is made up of six youngsters (mid-teenagers) who plan to travel to the K3LR contest station to compete. Donations will be used to fund transportation, hotels, meals and other trip related needs for these six and a few accompanying adults. The team consists of KM4ATT, KG5HVO, VE7DZO, HA8RT, K6JO and NN1C. You might recognize one of the calls in there as an SCCC member. Hint, formerly KK6NON and W6BQ, now K6JO! The Team Exuberance fund raiser has a goal of $5,000 and is very nearly there. I personally donated earlier in the name of SCCC. If you feel this is a worthy effort to encourage young contesters, you are invited to donate as well. Their Go Fund Me page is located here.
During last month's CQ WPX RTTY contest, my mind got to wandering while S&Ping Sunday morning. I worked out 40 meters, 15 wasn't open yet, and signals on 20 were still weak and fluttery. I was having trouble decoding much of anything, and started wondering if the 2Tone decoder would help. A quick search on the web brought me to the excellent RTTY Contesting web site. Installation looked simple enough. Hmm. I'm normally not one to fool around with things in the middle of a contest, and indeed, I told myself, no, don't do it! However, another 20 or 30 minutes of weak and fluttery signals caused me to throw caution to the wind. As it turns out, installation of a second receive window and 2Tone is very simple, and I had it up and running in minutes. This setup allows MMTTY and 2Tone to operate in parallel under N1MM+. I quickly noticed that yes, sometimes 2Tone would fully decode a signal where MMTTY didn't. However, there were other times where the opposite was true. Never-the-less, the addition of 2Tone to my N1MM+ setup was helpful as it gave me some decodes that I otherwise would have missed. You might even say that I finally got with the program! Pun intended! I'm often slow to try new things, and I know many of you have 2Tone and even GRTTY installed next to MMTTY, but if not, and you're interested, read up on it at RTTYcontesting.com.
Speaking of the WPX RTTY, the raw scores were published post haste (mid-Feb, a mere week after the contest)! W0YK tells us that the raw scores are generated by the log checking software before any reductions for errors and omissions. He stated that the final results will be published in the July issue of CQ Magazine and on the CQ WPX RTTY Contest web site. The raw scores page shows Bill, W8QZA piloting W6QU to 3rd place in All Band QRP in North America. Way to go, Bill!
There seems to be quite the attraction to the lower 10 kHz of the contesting spectrum for many that like to run. During a RTTY contest, it's especially challenging there. Everyone is on top of each other and despite heavy duty filtering, narrow receive bandwidths, IF shifts, et al, it's very challenging to decode anything. Meanwhile 20 kHz and up from the lower edge, no sweat. Perhaps those that pack themselves into the lower 10 kHz will consider spreading out a bit instead.
Final results of the February North American Sprint CW have been published. Participation was up substantially, making the contest even more fun than usual. Over the past decade the article says, the twenty winning operators (two Sprints per year) have predominately been in the western USA, and most of those in the Pacific Time Zone. Dan, N6MJ finished 7th overall. It now takes 15K points to make the top ten. Wow! The Top Ten QSO Totals box shows Dan at 5th and Marko, N5ZO at 10th. Axel, KI6RRN dipped his toe into this one, his first time ever in a Sprint. His 285 QSO total was outstanding for a first timer. We hope he'll be back for more down the road. The SCCC #1 team finished 2nd overall, just 6K points behind NCCC #1. Let's get 'em next time!
The 2018 IARU HF World Championship results were published in the March, 2019 issue of QST. Dick, W6TK placed 4th in the Single Op, Mixed Mode HP category. Axel, KI6RRN at WA6TQT took the top spot in the Single Op, Mixed Mode LP category. Paul, WN6K was 5th in that category. Alex, W6AFA placed 3rd in the Single Op, Phone Only HP group. Marko, N5ZO took 4th in the Single Op, Unlimited, CW Only HP category. All of these are in the US/Canada standings.
Preliminary results of the 2018 ARRL 10-Meter Contest have been published on the ARRL web site, although they are not complete. The only news I gleaned from there is that Bill, W8QZA operating with club call W6QU has won the Single Operator, Phone Only, QRP category. Bill you must be a masochist, but congrats!
Last month's ARRL DX CW contest brought out the troops! And by all accounts, was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone despite being at the bottom of the sunspot cycle. The SFI was at 70, A index at 4 and K index at 2. That made for quiet conditions, which helped with the lower strength signals all around. There were even a few spots on 10 meters! Let's see if the March Phone contest results in similar good fun. Some of the comments by SCCCers follow. "I have never worked as many Italian stations. It must be WRTC fever." "Nice opening to Europe on Saturday morning." "Great conditions Friday evening (stateside guys down in signal strength while DX was coming through well)." "Much noisier on Saturday than Friday." "40 meters opened to Europe both days before sunset and on Sunday, they were coming in just after 2 pm." "160m propagation from the Central Coast was pretty good into Zones 7, 8, 9, 14 and the Pacific. 80, 40, 20 and 15 had good propagation and were also pretty crowded." "Only put in 8 hours but had a couple of very nice EU runs on 20m both Saturday and Sunday." "Decent JA run on 20 on Saturday afternoon. Most notable moment was being called off the back of the antenna by ZT1T during a JA run." "Nice opening to EU Saturday morning, but was surprised by what seemed like fewer SA stations. Glad to hear and work a 4X, since I haven't heard one in a DX contest in quite some time. Fun contest." "Not much on 10, 15 was a little better but hardly great. 20 was fantastic most of the weekend. I heard/worked many strong Eu stations on 80." "Broke one of my old records - DXCC in 7.5 hours. This time, did it in 7.1 hours."
In June, we shared that Kenwood had announced the new TS-890S and Yaesu had announced the new FT-101D during last April's Dayton Hamvention. At the time, a few dealers were taking pre-order reservations. Well, the wait is over. Dealers are now taking full orders on what appears to be two FB new radios. These two radios are expected to be awfully good rigs for contesting and DXing. Reviews from users will be interesting to read. I, for one, will be watching eHam for new reviews.
I run across some really interesting, bizarre and sometimes scary things in my travels. Here, a picture from Kent's N6WT QRZ web page. I presume this is Kent in the Jeep. And no, I don't think this was an accident. I think this was intentional! His other hobby is the Desert Dawgs off road club. Thanks to them, Kent also got into amateur radio!
Managing contest teams can be hazardous to your health! Mental health, that is! The goal, of course, is to put everyone on the team where their score will maximize that team's score. That is, your highest scorers on team 1, next highest on team 2, etc. As a team organizer, your hope is to get that right every single time. In practice, it is VERY difficult to achieve. Despite your best efforts, things can happen. One of your high scorers has rig problems, software problems, or worse, and turns in a lower than expected score or a goose egg. Of course, no one is to blame for the unforeseen, but I still smack myself in the head sometimes when it happens. Conditions can play a part too. While we all live in Southern California, our territory is pretty far and wide. Conditions can vary just enough across the region to affect scores differently depending on where an operator is. Local QRN or interference can also tank one of our team member's scores. Or an unexpected visit from relatives. There are a plethora of things that are well beyond our members' control and that can affect a team score. Sometimes we get a late entrant/volunteer to be on a team, and that person should be on team 1, but I've already published the teams. Or, I misjudge the anticipated score by an entrant and place him or her on the wrong team. Argh. I take it all very personally because I want us to field the highest scoring teams that we can. I will say this. The February CW Sprint was a team manager's dream come true. We had ten operators volunteer to be on a team, and all were historically high scoring operators! I had to carefully select whom to put on which team. I mulled it over very carefully, and was pretty sure that no matter what, I would have several on the wrong team. It all worked out in the end, and we had two very strong performing teams with awesome final scores. Two full teams with everyone over 11K points in the Sprint?! Crazy good. That said, I hope that everyone will always sign up to be on a team. No matter your score, high, medium or low, we need you. NCCC had four teams in the February Sprint. There is no reason we can't have that many. We always, always, always want all of our club members to contribute to SCCC team and club scores!
ARRL is reporting that LOTW (Logbook of the World) has reached one billion QSO records! That's crazy! The one billionth QSO record was uploaded by 7X3WPL. It's true though that many DX stations (and even some domestic stations) have found it challenging to register for LOTW. I'm sure that many of you have read some rants about that on QRZ.com web pages. I know that ARRL is working to streamline the process. That said, it's an awesome (and quick!) way to get that needed QSL for DXCC, WAS, WPX, or WAZ. Impressively, contesters seem to be in tune with LOTW. Confirmations generally pour in quickly within hours of the end of a contest. And I must salute ARRL for its efforts in preserving the integrity of DXCC and other awards through the system.
Strange but true...
Tablecloths were originally meant to be served as towels with which dinner guests could wipe their hands and faces after eating.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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During last month's CQ WPX RTTY contest, my mind got to wandering while S&Ping Sunday morning. I worked out 40 meters, 15 wasn't open yet, and signals on 20 were still weak and fluttery. I was having trouble decoding much of anything, and started wondering if the 2Tone decoder would help. A quick search on the web brought me to the excellent RTTY Contesting web site. Installation looked simple enough. Hmm. I'm normally not one to fool around with things in the middle of a contest, and indeed, I told myself, no, don't do it! However, another 20 or 30 minutes of weak and fluttery signals caused me to throw caution to the wind. As it turns out, installation of a second receive window and 2Tone is very simple, and I had it up and running in minutes. This setup allows MMTTY and 2Tone to operate in parallel under N1MM+. I quickly noticed that yes, sometimes 2Tone would fully decode a signal where MMTTY didn't. However, there were other times where the opposite was true. Never-the-less, the addition of 2Tone to my N1MM+ setup was helpful as it gave me some decodes that I otherwise would have missed. You might even say that I finally got with the program! Pun intended! I'm often slow to try new things, and I know many of you have 2Tone and even GRTTY installed next to MMTTY, but if not, and you're interested, read up on it at RTTYcontesting.com.
Speaking of the WPX RTTY, the raw scores were published post haste (mid-Feb, a mere week after the contest)! W0YK tells us that the raw scores are generated by the log checking software before any reductions for errors and omissions. He stated that the final results will be published in the July issue of CQ Magazine and on the CQ WPX RTTY Contest web site. The raw scores page shows Bill, W8QZA piloting W6QU to 3rd place in All Band QRP in North America. Way to go, Bill!
There seems to be quite the attraction to the lower 10 kHz of the contesting spectrum for many that like to run. During a RTTY contest, it's especially challenging there. Everyone is on top of each other and despite heavy duty filtering, narrow receive bandwidths, IF shifts, et al, it's very challenging to decode anything. Meanwhile 20 kHz and up from the lower edge, no sweat. Perhaps those that pack themselves into the lower 10 kHz will consider spreading out a bit instead.
Final results of the February North American Sprint CW have been published. Participation was up substantially, making the contest even more fun than usual. Over the past decade the article says, the twenty winning operators (two Sprints per year) have predominately been in the western USA, and most of those in the Pacific Time Zone. Dan, N6MJ finished 7th overall. It now takes 15K points to make the top ten. Wow! The Top Ten QSO Totals box shows Dan at 5th and Marko, N5ZO at 10th. Axel, KI6RRN dipped his toe into this one, his first time ever in a Sprint. His 285 QSO total was outstanding for a first timer. We hope he'll be back for more down the road. The SCCC #1 team finished 2nd overall, just 6K points behind NCCC #1. Let's get 'em next time!
The 2018 IARU HF World Championship results were published in the March, 2019 issue of QST. Dick, W6TK placed 4th in the Single Op, Mixed Mode HP category. Axel, KI6RRN at WA6TQT took the top spot in the Single Op, Mixed Mode LP category. Paul, WN6K was 5th in that category. Alex, W6AFA placed 3rd in the Single Op, Phone Only HP group. Marko, N5ZO took 4th in the Single Op, Unlimited, CW Only HP category. All of these are in the US/Canada standings.
Preliminary results of the 2018 ARRL 10-Meter Contest have been published on the ARRL web site, although they are not complete. The only news I gleaned from there is that Bill, W8QZA operating with club call W6QU has won the Single Operator, Phone Only, QRP category. Bill you must be a masochist, but congrats!
Last month's ARRL DX CW contest brought out the troops! And by all accounts, was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone despite being at the bottom of the sunspot cycle. The SFI was at 70, A index at 4 and K index at 2. That made for quiet conditions, which helped with the lower strength signals all around. There were even a few spots on 10 meters! Let's see if the March Phone contest results in similar good fun. Some of the comments by SCCCers follow. "I have never worked as many Italian stations. It must be WRTC fever." "Nice opening to Europe on Saturday morning." "Great conditions Friday evening (stateside guys down in signal strength while DX was coming through well)." "Much noisier on Saturday than Friday." "40 meters opened to Europe both days before sunset and on Sunday, they were coming in just after 2 pm." "160m propagation from the Central Coast was pretty good into Zones 7, 8, 9, 14 and the Pacific. 80, 40, 20 and 15 had good propagation and were also pretty crowded." "Only put in 8 hours but had a couple of very nice EU runs on 20m both Saturday and Sunday." "Decent JA run on 20 on Saturday afternoon. Most notable moment was being called off the back of the antenna by ZT1T during a JA run." "Nice opening to EU Saturday morning, but was surprised by what seemed like fewer SA stations. Glad to hear and work a 4X, since I haven't heard one in a DX contest in quite some time. Fun contest." "Not much on 10, 15 was a little better but hardly great. 20 was fantastic most of the weekend. I heard/worked many strong Eu stations on 80." "Broke one of my old records - DXCC in 7.5 hours. This time, did it in 7.1 hours."
In June, we shared that Kenwood had announced the new TS-890S and Yaesu had announced the new FT-101D during last April's Dayton Hamvention. At the time, a few dealers were taking pre-order reservations. Well, the wait is over. Dealers are now taking full orders on what appears to be two FB new radios. These two radios are expected to be awfully good rigs for contesting and DXing. Reviews from users will be interesting to read. I, for one, will be watching eHam for new reviews.
I run across some really interesting, bizarre and sometimes scary things in my travels. Here, a picture from Kent's N6WT QRZ web page. I presume this is Kent in the Jeep. And no, I don't think this was an accident. I think this was intentional! His other hobby is the Desert Dawgs off road club. Thanks to them, Kent also got into amateur radio!
Managing contest teams can be hazardous to your health! Mental health, that is! The goal, of course, is to put everyone on the team where their score will maximize that team's score. That is, your highest scorers on team 1, next highest on team 2, etc. As a team organizer, your hope is to get that right every single time. In practice, it is VERY difficult to achieve. Despite your best efforts, things can happen. One of your high scorers has rig problems, software problems, or worse, and turns in a lower than expected score or a goose egg. Of course, no one is to blame for the unforeseen, but I still smack myself in the head sometimes when it happens. Conditions can play a part too. While we all live in Southern California, our territory is pretty far and wide. Conditions can vary just enough across the region to affect scores differently depending on where an operator is. Local QRN or interference can also tank one of our team member's scores. Or an unexpected visit from relatives. There are a plethora of things that are well beyond our members' control and that can affect a team score. Sometimes we get a late entrant/volunteer to be on a team, and that person should be on team 1, but I've already published the teams. Or, I misjudge the anticipated score by an entrant and place him or her on the wrong team. Argh. I take it all very personally because I want us to field the highest scoring teams that we can. I will say this. The February CW Sprint was a team manager's dream come true. We had ten operators volunteer to be on a team, and all were historically high scoring operators! I had to carefully select whom to put on which team. I mulled it over very carefully, and was pretty sure that no matter what, I would have several on the wrong team. It all worked out in the end, and we had two very strong performing teams with awesome final scores. Two full teams with everyone over 11K points in the Sprint?! Crazy good. That said, I hope that everyone will always sign up to be on a team. No matter your score, high, medium or low, we need you. NCCC had four teams in the February Sprint. There is no reason we can't have that many. We always, always, always want all of our club members to contribute to SCCC team and club scores!
ARRL is reporting that LOTW (Logbook of the World) has reached one billion QSO records! That's crazy! The one billionth QSO record was uploaded by 7X3WPL. It's true though that many DX stations (and even some domestic stations) have found it challenging to register for LOTW. I'm sure that many of you have read some rants about that on QRZ.com web pages. I know that ARRL is working to streamline the process. That said, it's an awesome (and quick!) way to get that needed QSL for DXCC, WAS, WPX, or WAZ. Impressively, contesters seem to be in tune with LOTW. Confirmations generally pour in quickly within hours of the end of a contest. And I must salute ARRL for its efforts in preserving the integrity of DXCC and other awards through the system.
Strange but true...
Tablecloths were originally meant to be served as towels with which dinner guests could wipe their hands and faces after eating.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
Monthly News (SCCCORE)
February 2019
Welcome aboard to our first new member of 2019, Stephen, K6AW! Stephen hails from Santa Barbara and enjoys HF contesting.
Have you heard this before? "Read the contest rules before starting the contest." That one hit home for yours truly last month. I added my call to the SCCC #4 team in NAQP CW so as to fill out the five member team. I knew I had limited time to operate but thought I could get in a few dozen Q's. I wound up having a little more time than I thought though. Surprisingly (at the time), I was able to work everything I could hear, even the extremely weak stations. Having fun with that, I put in more time than I expected and logged 135 contacts in just over three hours of mostly S&P. I had to admit that I was pretty happy with that. The following morning, I noticed that almost all of the entries on 3830scores showed as low power. DOH! I'd run high power the entire time, totally forgetting the fact that NAQP is a LP affair. Sorry SCCC #4. The NE6I log became a checklog. Repeat after me, "Read the contest rules before starting the contest." And take nothing for granted!
ARRL reports a "dramatic uptick" in the number of logs submitted in this year's ARRL RTTY Roundup (which took place the first weekend in January) as compared to 2018. Their informal polling indicates that RTTY and FT8 successfully shared spectrum during the contest as well. Early returns indicate that most operators operated one mode or the other but a small percentage operated both. WSJT-X co-developer K1JT logged an astounding 585 FT8 contacts during the contest! As a reminder, if using FT8 in an ARRL contest, you must enter one of the Unlimited categories if operating single operator. This is because WSJT-X is a multi-decoder.
Preliminary results for the ARRL SS Phone contest are now out. The K6AM station is atop the MSHP category. Full results will be published in the June issue of QST.
Preliminary results for the January NAQP CW are also out. Marko, N5ZO shows as 2nd place overall, followed closely by Axel, KI6RRN in 3rd. The SCCC #1 team shows as 2nd place in the team competition, with only 65K and a smidge points separating us from the top spot in a 1.3M point battle! Oh so close! Those preliminary results can be viewed here.
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Have you heard this before? "Read the contest rules before starting the contest." That one hit home for yours truly last month. I added my call to the SCCC #4 team in NAQP CW so as to fill out the five member team. I knew I had limited time to operate but thought I could get in a few dozen Q's. I wound up having a little more time than I thought though. Surprisingly (at the time), I was able to work everything I could hear, even the extremely weak stations. Having fun with that, I put in more time than I expected and logged 135 contacts in just over three hours of mostly S&P. I had to admit that I was pretty happy with that. The following morning, I noticed that almost all of the entries on 3830scores showed as low power. DOH! I'd run high power the entire time, totally forgetting the fact that NAQP is a LP affair. Sorry SCCC #4. The NE6I log became a checklog. Repeat after me, "Read the contest rules before starting the contest." And take nothing for granted!
ARRL reports a "dramatic uptick" in the number of logs submitted in this year's ARRL RTTY Roundup (which took place the first weekend in January) as compared to 2018. Their informal polling indicates that RTTY and FT8 successfully shared spectrum during the contest as well. Early returns indicate that most operators operated one mode or the other but a small percentage operated both. WSJT-X co-developer K1JT logged an astounding 585 FT8 contacts during the contest! As a reminder, if using FT8 in an ARRL contest, you must enter one of the Unlimited categories if operating single operator. This is because WSJT-X is a multi-decoder.
Preliminary results for the ARRL SS Phone contest are now out. The K6AM station is atop the MSHP category. Full results will be published in the June issue of QST.
Preliminary results for the January NAQP CW are also out. Marko, N5ZO shows as 2nd place overall, followed closely by Axel, KI6RRN in 3rd. The SCCC #1 team shows as 2nd place in the team competition, with only 65K and a smidge points separating us from the top spot in a 1.3M point battle! Oh so close! Those preliminary results can be viewed here.
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In the ARRL September VHF Contest, Bruce KG6IYN finished second in the Single Op, 3 Band category and John, K6MI placed 5th in the Unlimited Rover category. As this was written, the January, 2019 edition of the contest had just taken place. Conditions in Southern California were less than great, but there were definitely Sporadic-E openings on six meters late Saturday and Sunday.
The 2018 ARRL November Sweepstakes CW results have been published. There is a humorous (or some would call it sad) blurb in the writeup that captures the essence of the 2018 contest: "Welcome to Sweepstakes at the bottom of the cycle: when 10-meters is a wasteland, 15 only slightly better and the bulk of activity is concentrated on 20 during the day." No kidding. The article reports that there were only 7-14 QSOs on 10 meters in the submitted logs. Wow! Dave, K6LL placed 6th overall in the SO Unlimited HP category and right behind him was Marko, N5ZO. Full results can be found here.
In the 2018 ARRL 222 MHz and Up Distance Contest, Wayne, N6NB ran through 8 grids to log 231 contacts. Greg, W6IT accounted for many of those, and logged 117 Q's to post the regions' top SO score. Full results for this contest can be found here.
And in the North American Sprint RTTY, September edition, Levi KK6NON (now K6JO) placed 7th overall, and 2nd in the Low Power category! Nicely done! We didn't enter any teams in this one but if we had, the SCCC team would have placed fourth.
Somewhere in my travels, I came across a company in Japan that makes a MASSIVE antenna for amateur radio. The Versa Beam KA-1 411X operates on 40 through 6 meters and sports a boom of 20 meters in length (just over 65 ft)! The beast has 5 elements on 40/30 meters, 7 elements on 20/17 meters, 9 on 15/12/10 and 15 elements on 6 meters! The gain figures are crazy. 15.6 dBi on 20 meters, 17.2 on 15 meters and 17.6 on 10 meters. By comparison, the SteppIR MonstIR DB-42 is spec'ed at 10.1, 11.0 and 12.2 dBi respectively. Obviously, the two antennas are not quite in the same class as each other, other than being massive pieces of hardware and the top of the line for each of the two manufacturers. The OB16-5 by Optibeam comes close but is shy in the numbers a bit. Want to check out the Versa Beam yourself? Slide on over to their web site and check it out for yourself. (I don't mean this to be an advertisement or endorsement of Versa Beam. I'm simply admiring this massive antenna!)
Carl, K9LA writes a column about propagation and has long been fascinated by the subject. In his article in the recent issue of NCJ, he says the current solar minimum will be another long one. He says that the Cycle 25 peak should occur in 2022 or 2023 and will be lower than Cycle 24. Ugh. The earthsky.org web site suggests that the bottom of Cycle 24 will occur in December of this year.
Now we know the secret to Marko's N5ZO big scores! Lots of video monitors! Not to mention a plethora of equipment in his finely equipped station! This photo, courtesy of QST magazine, shows Marko operating SO2R in the NA Sprint CW. His station sports a pair of Elecraft K3's. It looks an awful lot like he is smiling here, and he well should be. He cracked the Top Ten in this particular Sprint!
If you subscribed to the free weekly Ohio/Penn DX Bulletin edited by KB8NW, please note that the server HAMNET.org, which he has used since the late 1980's, was hacked and wiped on January 11. The Mailing List is currently in limbo. The weekly bulletin may still be accessed on the web at www.papays.com/opdx.html. More details about the hack can be found at the top of Bulletin 1399 (January 21, 2019 issue).
It has been reported that there have been some changes to the rules that will be in effect for WRTC 2022. The initial qualification rules can be found here. The change log is reportedly as follows.
2. Category Weighting for SO-LP is 0.9 and for SOA-LP is 0.85
2.1, 2.2 Clarified that SOSB and SOAB of the same power level are compared directly for Qualification Event Scores
2.5 WRTC-Style MS/M2 teams have been removed.
3. Selection Areas (SA) and Team Leaders (TL) (renamed)
New column headings TL from Continent and TL from Area
Removed limit of max. 2 per country from EU
Increased TL for EU from 17 to 18
Moved OX from EU#1 to NA#2
Moved OY from EU#3 to EU#1
Moved UA1 from EU#1 to EU#4
EU#1, EU#2, and EU#4 have 2 TL, EU#3 has 3 TL
NA#4, NA#7, NA#10 changes
Added VP9 to CA#1
AS#4, AS#5 changes
SA#1 – noted that PJ only applies to PJ in Zone 9
Moved PY0S/PY0F to SA#2, leaving PY0T in SA#4
SA#3, SA#4 changes
List of exceptions to 1 TL per country rule. Added note that TL must qualify, not guaranteed slot except for UA1/UA3/UA4
4. Added special scoring for UA and non-UA stations in RDXC.
5. Corrected regular MS/M2/MM scores to 4.
6.1 Noted the process of choosing TL/TM for Sponsored or Wild Card is TBD.
6.2 Changed to last three WRTC and top twenty (20) places, including Sponsored and Wild Card TL
6.3 Required proof of license and permission for scores from outside SA of residence
6.6 New Determination of Home SA rules
7. New TM qualification rules
7.2, 7.3 Clarification that TM rules does not apply to Sponsored Teams
8. Reduced Youth Teams from 7 to 6
Strange but true...
Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second!
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
The 2018 ARRL November Sweepstakes CW results have been published. There is a humorous (or some would call it sad) blurb in the writeup that captures the essence of the 2018 contest: "Welcome to Sweepstakes at the bottom of the cycle: when 10-meters is a wasteland, 15 only slightly better and the bulk of activity is concentrated on 20 during the day." No kidding. The article reports that there were only 7-14 QSOs on 10 meters in the submitted logs. Wow! Dave, K6LL placed 6th overall in the SO Unlimited HP category and right behind him was Marko, N5ZO. Full results can be found here.
In the 2018 ARRL 222 MHz and Up Distance Contest, Wayne, N6NB ran through 8 grids to log 231 contacts. Greg, W6IT accounted for many of those, and logged 117 Q's to post the regions' top SO score. Full results for this contest can be found here.
And in the North American Sprint RTTY, September edition, Levi KK6NON (now K6JO) placed 7th overall, and 2nd in the Low Power category! Nicely done! We didn't enter any teams in this one but if we had, the SCCC team would have placed fourth.
Somewhere in my travels, I came across a company in Japan that makes a MASSIVE antenna for amateur radio. The Versa Beam KA-1 411X operates on 40 through 6 meters and sports a boom of 20 meters in length (just over 65 ft)! The beast has 5 elements on 40/30 meters, 7 elements on 20/17 meters, 9 on 15/12/10 and 15 elements on 6 meters! The gain figures are crazy. 15.6 dBi on 20 meters, 17.2 on 15 meters and 17.6 on 10 meters. By comparison, the SteppIR MonstIR DB-42 is spec'ed at 10.1, 11.0 and 12.2 dBi respectively. Obviously, the two antennas are not quite in the same class as each other, other than being massive pieces of hardware and the top of the line for each of the two manufacturers. The OB16-5 by Optibeam comes close but is shy in the numbers a bit. Want to check out the Versa Beam yourself? Slide on over to their web site and check it out for yourself. (I don't mean this to be an advertisement or endorsement of Versa Beam. I'm simply admiring this massive antenna!)
Carl, K9LA writes a column about propagation and has long been fascinated by the subject. In his article in the recent issue of NCJ, he says the current solar minimum will be another long one. He says that the Cycle 25 peak should occur in 2022 or 2023 and will be lower than Cycle 24. Ugh. The earthsky.org web site suggests that the bottom of Cycle 24 will occur in December of this year.
Now we know the secret to Marko's N5ZO big scores! Lots of video monitors! Not to mention a plethora of equipment in his finely equipped station! This photo, courtesy of QST magazine, shows Marko operating SO2R in the NA Sprint CW. His station sports a pair of Elecraft K3's. It looks an awful lot like he is smiling here, and he well should be. He cracked the Top Ten in this particular Sprint!
If you subscribed to the free weekly Ohio/Penn DX Bulletin edited by KB8NW, please note that the server HAMNET.org, which he has used since the late 1980's, was hacked and wiped on January 11. The Mailing List is currently in limbo. The weekly bulletin may still be accessed on the web at www.papays.com/opdx.html. More details about the hack can be found at the top of Bulletin 1399 (January 21, 2019 issue).
It has been reported that there have been some changes to the rules that will be in effect for WRTC 2022. The initial qualification rules can be found here. The change log is reportedly as follows.
2. Category Weighting for SO-LP is 0.9 and for SOA-LP is 0.85
2.1, 2.2 Clarified that SOSB and SOAB of the same power level are compared directly for Qualification Event Scores
2.5 WRTC-Style MS/M2 teams have been removed.
3. Selection Areas (SA) and Team Leaders (TL) (renamed)
New column headings TL from Continent and TL from Area
Removed limit of max. 2 per country from EU
Increased TL for EU from 17 to 18
Moved OX from EU#1 to NA#2
Moved OY from EU#3 to EU#1
Moved UA1 from EU#1 to EU#4
EU#1, EU#2, and EU#4 have 2 TL, EU#3 has 3 TL
NA#4, NA#7, NA#10 changes
Added VP9 to CA#1
AS#4, AS#5 changes
SA#1 – noted that PJ only applies to PJ in Zone 9
Moved PY0S/PY0F to SA#2, leaving PY0T in SA#4
SA#3, SA#4 changes
List of exceptions to 1 TL per country rule. Added note that TL must qualify, not guaranteed slot except for UA1/UA3/UA4
4. Added special scoring for UA and non-UA stations in RDXC.
5. Corrected regular MS/M2/MM scores to 4.
6.1 Noted the process of choosing TL/TM for Sponsored or Wild Card is TBD.
6.2 Changed to last three WRTC and top twenty (20) places, including Sponsored and Wild Card TL
6.3 Required proof of license and permission for scores from outside SA of residence
6.6 New Determination of Home SA rules
7. New TM qualification rules
7.2, 7.3 Clarification that TM rules does not apply to Sponsored Teams
8. Reduced Youth Teams from 7 to 6
Strange but true...
Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second!
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Monthly News (SCCCORE)
January 2019
Welcome aboard to Mike, KX6A in Newport Beach. Mike was first licensed in 2007, and enjoys Summits on the Air (SOTA). Two of his sons are also licensed (N6NGG and N6WMG). Mike is new to contesting but is enjoying learning about it.
December is typically a slow month for contesters. There aren't a lot of major contests going on, and we are all busy dreaming of amateur radio gifts under the tree. Uh, busy shopping for gifts for family and friends! Okay, we are busy doing both of those! The weather has cooled and we aren't typically busy with antenna work either. Although... as I type this particular paragraph on Xmas Eve day, it's 70 degrees at my QTH and I've tried to be outside to enjoy it much of the day.
In case you missed it, registration has opened for the 2019 ConTest University presentation at the Dayton Hamvention in Xenia, Ohio. The faculty lineup, posted on the CTU website, includes several new and returning members. Newcomer Bryant, KG5HVO, will present ideas for attracting youth into contesting, while Dan, N6MJ, and Chris, KL9A — the gold medalists at WRTC 2014 — will present advanced operating papers. More info can be found here.
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On Christmas Eve, K6AM announced that the 2018 California QSO Party results had been published at the CQP web site.
John's announcement included the following:
(quote)
Once again, all 58 CA counties were on the air for CQP 2018. We received 905 logs before the log submission deadline on October 22, 2018. Over the last 8 weeks, under the leadership of Cabrillo Conquistador Tom Epperly (NS6T), the CQP team worked carefully and efficiently to streamline the log-checking process without sacrificing quality or accuracy of results. Adjudicating 905 logs in just 8 weeks is a new record for the CQP team.
What you’ll find on the website:
- A list of all 51 Plaque Winners — a record number of plaques this year. Congratulations to all !
- A list of the 40 Wine Winners — thanks to our sponsor Twisted Oak Winery
- Complete reports for California, USA, Canada, DX
- Club Competition Results - Congratulations to MLDXCC (Large Category) and REDXA (Small Category)
- Top-10 Reports - CA and Non-CA
- Top-YL Reports - CA and Non-CA
- All-Time Records Updated
- Soapbox Comments
- 2018 “Print-Your-Own” Certificate Of Achievement
Thank you for participating. We hope you had fun! If you couldn’t make it, not to worry. In just 284 days the 54th Running of the CQP will take place. Hope to see you on the air October 5th and 6th !
(unquote)
So how did SCCC do? Well, I would say Not Too Darned Bad!
N6MJ took top honors in SO HP.
Right behind him in second was N6WIN.
KI6RRN took first in SO LP.
K6ZZ was second in SO LP.
W6TK was second in SO HP Assisted.
KM6Z was first in SO LP Assisted.
W6RFU operated by AC6T and non-member W6AAF was first in the Top School category.
NO6T operated by N5ZO and N6AN took top honors in the MS category.
N6WIN had the most Phone QSOs.
WA6KHK took 2nd in the QRP category.
Many of these stations won CQP wine and will be seeing their prize arrive at their door step before long!
And of course, there really was no competition in the Medium California Club category. SCCC earned another plaque in that one. And while we were at it, we beat the Motherlode DX/Contest Club's score in the Large California Contest Club category by 400K plus. In other words, we trounced every other club this year! (Granted, NCCC did not put in an effort here. Their members were spread out amongst other clubs.)
Congratulations to all on a GREAT SHOWING!
The 2018 CQ WPX CW contest results were published in the November issue of CQ Magazine, which arrived at my door in late December. This was the 40th running of this very popular contest. K6LA took #4 in the world Single Op All Band High Power operating VY2TT. N6CW placed 3rd in the USA Single Op 14 MHz High Power category. KI6RRN took 3rd in the USA Single Op All Band Low Power category. And W8QZA piloted W6QU to 2nd place in the USA Single Op All Band QRP category. The SCCC placed 6th in the USA Club standings with just over 44 million points!
A very spirited conversation took place on the CQ-CONTEST reflector in throughout December about FT8 and contesting. This was prompted by the FT8 practice contest and the January, 2019 addition of FT8 as a newly allowed mode in the ARRL RTTY Roundup contest. There were very strong feelings on both sides of the fence. I had to wonder if this is how it felt back when SSB was introduced to the bands and AM users thought it was the end of the world. Hint: FT8 won't be the end of ham radio as we know it, just as SSB wasn't and the end of CW as a USA licensing requirement wasn't. Et al. In the meantime, we will see a lot of conversation about FT8 and how it fits or doesn't fit into contesting. And as many of you know, I've been gathering comments from SCCCers that were there when amateur radio SSB started to replace AM. I'm still working on that article for future publication here on our web site. Lots of great stuff has come in so far!
VE6EY sent us a link to his series of very interesting articles. The web site, which he calls "Making It Up", includes some fascinating articles about beamforming, including doing so in ham radio with phased arrays. Other articles include information about beamforming used in other communications spectrum and industries. Did you know that some of the wi-fi routers we use for internet connectivity today use beamforming to improve coverage in parts of our home? John also has many other interesting articles on the web site. If you're like me, you'll wind up spending quite a bit of time reading them.
Results of the the 2018 FT8 Roundup contest have been posted here, and the write up is pretty interesting. FT8, of course, has become one of the most quickly adopted new modes in amateur radio history. It's ability to facilitate relatively quick QSOs (compared to the JT modes, that is) with receive signal levels as much as 20 dB or so below the noise has allowed a whole new group of hams to work DX that they never before dreamed of working. I personally worked all states in a few short weeks using 1 watt or less myself! As we know,
the mode is being debated ad infinitum on reflectors and forums. Does it have a place in amateur radio? Contesting? DXCC? The answer to the first and last of those three is a whole hearted YES. The
mode allows for a whole group of hams with limited stations to work the world like never before, not to mention the rest of us working stations on bands otherwise thought to be dead. The answer to the second one, contesting, is still up for debate. A dedicated FT8 Roundup of course answers that, but mixing it with the RTTY Roundup? Well, we shall see. ARRL has approved it for use in this January's contest. We can all speculate but even for the high rate junkies amongst us (and that's ALL of us, no?), we may want to add FT8 to our list of tools to add Q's to the final score. It's interesting to note that in this initial FT8 Roundup in December, WV4P won operating as SO2R (one TX on the even time slot and one TX on the odd time slot) with 693 QSOs and 95 mults in 30 hours. Not too bad for a "slower than CW and SSB mode!" Perhaps more importantly, he is brand new to contesting. Another addict? Let's hope! Meanwhile, Dave, K6LL (pictured here) finished 2nd! Dave is new to FT8 and also operated SO2R. There is obviously promise in this new mode in the contest world. And even if we determine that it's not necessarily a good mix with the RTTY Roundup, etc., perhaps we get another contest fix by operating the FT8 Roundup! Time will tell how this new mode fits into our contesting world. Hats off to the software developers for responding to requests to explore this area!
The December ARRL 10-meter contest seems to have awakened the band! Despite an A index of 10 and K index of 2 (SFI 71) on that Saturday (only slightly better on Sunday), a healthy number of spots were observed. SCCC pre-arranged 28.040 and 28.440 for some local contacts during the contest. Unfortunately, at my limited QTH, I heard no activity on either frequency. I spent the last couple of hours on Sunday CQing on 28.040 (the only time I had available to get in on the fun that weekend) and raised a small number of answers, all local to me though. I did get a couple of XE's but they are pretty close to me so... From the spots and reports I saw though, it is pretty amazing what can be done on 10 at the low end of the sunspot cycle during a contest that is focused on that band!
I trust that everyone had a good holiday season and rang in the new year with resolutions of going bigger and better in the 2019 contests! See you on the air!
Strange but true...
In Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for most trips of less than 50 minutes!
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
John's announcement included the following:
(quote)
Once again, all 58 CA counties were on the air for CQP 2018. We received 905 logs before the log submission deadline on October 22, 2018. Over the last 8 weeks, under the leadership of Cabrillo Conquistador Tom Epperly (NS6T), the CQP team worked carefully and efficiently to streamline the log-checking process without sacrificing quality or accuracy of results. Adjudicating 905 logs in just 8 weeks is a new record for the CQP team.
What you’ll find on the website:
- A list of all 51 Plaque Winners — a record number of plaques this year. Congratulations to all !
- A list of the 40 Wine Winners — thanks to our sponsor Twisted Oak Winery
- Complete reports for California, USA, Canada, DX
- Club Competition Results - Congratulations to MLDXCC (Large Category) and REDXA (Small Category)
- Top-10 Reports - CA and Non-CA
- Top-YL Reports - CA and Non-CA
- All-Time Records Updated
- Soapbox Comments
- 2018 “Print-Your-Own” Certificate Of Achievement
Thank you for participating. We hope you had fun! If you couldn’t make it, not to worry. In just 284 days the 54th Running of the CQP will take place. Hope to see you on the air October 5th and 6th !
(unquote)
So how did SCCC do? Well, I would say Not Too Darned Bad!
N6MJ took top honors in SO HP.
Right behind him in second was N6WIN.
KI6RRN took first in SO LP.
K6ZZ was second in SO LP.
W6TK was second in SO HP Assisted.
KM6Z was first in SO LP Assisted.
W6RFU operated by AC6T and non-member W6AAF was first in the Top School category.
NO6T operated by N5ZO and N6AN took top honors in the MS category.
N6WIN had the most Phone QSOs.
WA6KHK took 2nd in the QRP category.
Many of these stations won CQP wine and will be seeing their prize arrive at their door step before long!
And of course, there really was no competition in the Medium California Club category. SCCC earned another plaque in that one. And while we were at it, we beat the Motherlode DX/Contest Club's score in the Large California Contest Club category by 400K plus. In other words, we trounced every other club this year! (Granted, NCCC did not put in an effort here. Their members were spread out amongst other clubs.)
Congratulations to all on a GREAT SHOWING!
The 2018 CQ WPX CW contest results were published in the November issue of CQ Magazine, which arrived at my door in late December. This was the 40th running of this very popular contest. K6LA took #4 in the world Single Op All Band High Power operating VY2TT. N6CW placed 3rd in the USA Single Op 14 MHz High Power category. KI6RRN took 3rd in the USA Single Op All Band Low Power category. And W8QZA piloted W6QU to 2nd place in the USA Single Op All Band QRP category. The SCCC placed 6th in the USA Club standings with just over 44 million points!
A very spirited conversation took place on the CQ-CONTEST reflector in throughout December about FT8 and contesting. This was prompted by the FT8 practice contest and the January, 2019 addition of FT8 as a newly allowed mode in the ARRL RTTY Roundup contest. There were very strong feelings on both sides of the fence. I had to wonder if this is how it felt back when SSB was introduced to the bands and AM users thought it was the end of the world. Hint: FT8 won't be the end of ham radio as we know it, just as SSB wasn't and the end of CW as a USA licensing requirement wasn't. Et al. In the meantime, we will see a lot of conversation about FT8 and how it fits or doesn't fit into contesting. And as many of you know, I've been gathering comments from SCCCers that were there when amateur radio SSB started to replace AM. I'm still working on that article for future publication here on our web site. Lots of great stuff has come in so far!
VE6EY sent us a link to his series of very interesting articles. The web site, which he calls "Making It Up", includes some fascinating articles about beamforming, including doing so in ham radio with phased arrays. Other articles include information about beamforming used in other communications spectrum and industries. Did you know that some of the wi-fi routers we use for internet connectivity today use beamforming to improve coverage in parts of our home? John also has many other interesting articles on the web site. If you're like me, you'll wind up spending quite a bit of time reading them.
Results of the the 2018 FT8 Roundup contest have been posted here, and the write up is pretty interesting. FT8, of course, has become one of the most quickly adopted new modes in amateur radio history. It's ability to facilitate relatively quick QSOs (compared to the JT modes, that is) with receive signal levels as much as 20 dB or so below the noise has allowed a whole new group of hams to work DX that they never before dreamed of working. I personally worked all states in a few short weeks using 1 watt or less myself! As we know,
the mode is being debated ad infinitum on reflectors and forums. Does it have a place in amateur radio? Contesting? DXCC? The answer to the first and last of those three is a whole hearted YES. The
mode allows for a whole group of hams with limited stations to work the world like never before, not to mention the rest of us working stations on bands otherwise thought to be dead. The answer to the second one, contesting, is still up for debate. A dedicated FT8 Roundup of course answers that, but mixing it with the RTTY Roundup? Well, we shall see. ARRL has approved it for use in this January's contest. We can all speculate but even for the high rate junkies amongst us (and that's ALL of us, no?), we may want to add FT8 to our list of tools to add Q's to the final score. It's interesting to note that in this initial FT8 Roundup in December, WV4P won operating as SO2R (one TX on the even time slot and one TX on the odd time slot) with 693 QSOs and 95 mults in 30 hours. Not too bad for a "slower than CW and SSB mode!" Perhaps more importantly, he is brand new to contesting. Another addict? Let's hope! Meanwhile, Dave, K6LL (pictured here) finished 2nd! Dave is new to FT8 and also operated SO2R. There is obviously promise in this new mode in the contest world. And even if we determine that it's not necessarily a good mix with the RTTY Roundup, etc., perhaps we get another contest fix by operating the FT8 Roundup! Time will tell how this new mode fits into our contesting world. Hats off to the software developers for responding to requests to explore this area!
The December ARRL 10-meter contest seems to have awakened the band! Despite an A index of 10 and K index of 2 (SFI 71) on that Saturday (only slightly better on Sunday), a healthy number of spots were observed. SCCC pre-arranged 28.040 and 28.440 for some local contacts during the contest. Unfortunately, at my limited QTH, I heard no activity on either frequency. I spent the last couple of hours on Sunday CQing on 28.040 (the only time I had available to get in on the fun that weekend) and raised a small number of answers, all local to me though. I did get a couple of XE's but they are pretty close to me so... From the spots and reports I saw though, it is pretty amazing what can be done on 10 at the low end of the sunspot cycle during a contest that is focused on that band!
I trust that everyone had a good holiday season and rang in the new year with resolutions of going bigger and better in the 2019 contests! See you on the air!
Strange but true...
In Tokyo, a bicycle is faster than a car for most trips of less than 50 minutes!
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
Monthly News (SCCCORE)
December 2018
We are now well into the fall/winter contest season, and many of you have been quite active. There have been some really good scores too. Even though we are at the low end of the sunspot cycle, there is plenty of fun to be had. So get those stations on the air!
Speaking of stations, if you're interested in making yours available to a guest operator, or you'd like to be a guest operator, or if your multi-op effort needs an operator or two, be sure to post on the SCCC Reflector or let me know. Let's keep So Cal active!
Recently, there was some excitement that a group of sunspots that were observed in late August possibly signaled the start of Cycle 25. It feels like we have been at the bottom of Cycle 24 for a long time, perhaps made worse in our minds by the relatively poor peak back in 2014. In April of that year, the smoothed sunspot number reached 81.8, the lowest peak since the early 1800's. So hopes were high that we had turned the corner. Not so, said The Royal Observatory of Belgium's Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence. Experts there stated that those particular sunspots belong to the current solar cycle, not 25. Oh so close...
NCJ has published the final results of the July NAQP RTTY now. The SCCC #1 team finished 13th. Axel, KI6RRN finished tops in California, and just missed making the top ten overall. Levi, KK6NON took 4th place in California.
The final results of the September North American Sprint CW were also published by NCJ. The SCCC #1 team took 5th place in this one. Marko, N5ZO finished 10th overall and 4th in California. Dan, N6MJ was close behind at 5th in California. Marko, by the way, had the top Golden Log in the contest with 314 QSOs!
The CQWW DX CW has just ended as I write this particular paragraph. SCCC was out in force, and conditions seemed particularly good compared to recent months. We didn't even have a solar flare or other disturbance to rain on CW weekend for a change! It was fun watching the battle on the scoreboard between TI7W (KL9A) and ZF1A (N6MJ) throughout the contest. Dan held the lead early on but Chris later pulled in front, and slowly built his lead. As the contest wound down, Dan began climbing back, but alas, Chris's lead was too much to overcome. A mere 3% separated the two final scores (a 652 QSO difference in a horse race where both had over 9,000!). To give some perspective, K5ZD finished 3rd in the category but was 9.7 million points and about 6,300 QSOs behind Dan in 2nd. Wow! The Contest Online Scoreboard reported that ZF1A had the highest hourly rate at 372! Sheez! Also out on DXpeditions were Jim, N6TJ at KH7M, Marko, N5ZO in Russia using RM0F at the QTH of UA3DPX and I believe Dick, N6AA was out somewhere as well. We had a really good turn out for this contest. It's great to see that. However, with 181 current members in our circle, we have some work to do to get even more activity. By the way, I ran across an interesting write up of some of the history of the CQWW DX contest on CQ's web site.
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Speaking of stations, if you're interested in making yours available to a guest operator, or you'd like to be a guest operator, or if your multi-op effort needs an operator or two, be sure to post on the SCCC Reflector or let me know. Let's keep So Cal active!
Recently, there was some excitement that a group of sunspots that were observed in late August possibly signaled the start of Cycle 25. It feels like we have been at the bottom of Cycle 24 for a long time, perhaps made worse in our minds by the relatively poor peak back in 2014. In April of that year, the smoothed sunspot number reached 81.8, the lowest peak since the early 1800's. So hopes were high that we had turned the corner. Not so, said The Royal Observatory of Belgium's Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence. Experts there stated that those particular sunspots belong to the current solar cycle, not 25. Oh so close...
NCJ has published the final results of the July NAQP RTTY now. The SCCC #1 team finished 13th. Axel, KI6RRN finished tops in California, and just missed making the top ten overall. Levi, KK6NON took 4th place in California.
The final results of the September North American Sprint CW were also published by NCJ. The SCCC #1 team took 5th place in this one. Marko, N5ZO finished 10th overall and 4th in California. Dan, N6MJ was close behind at 5th in California. Marko, by the way, had the top Golden Log in the contest with 314 QSOs!
The CQWW DX CW has just ended as I write this particular paragraph. SCCC was out in force, and conditions seemed particularly good compared to recent months. We didn't even have a solar flare or other disturbance to rain on CW weekend for a change! It was fun watching the battle on the scoreboard between TI7W (KL9A) and ZF1A (N6MJ) throughout the contest. Dan held the lead early on but Chris later pulled in front, and slowly built his lead. As the contest wound down, Dan began climbing back, but alas, Chris's lead was too much to overcome. A mere 3% separated the two final scores (a 652 QSO difference in a horse race where both had over 9,000!). To give some perspective, K5ZD finished 3rd in the category but was 9.7 million points and about 6,300 QSOs behind Dan in 2nd. Wow! The Contest Online Scoreboard reported that ZF1A had the highest hourly rate at 372! Sheez! Also out on DXpeditions were Jim, N6TJ at KH7M, Marko, N5ZO in Russia using RM0F at the QTH of UA3DPX and I believe Dick, N6AA was out somewhere as well. We had a really good turn out for this contest. It's great to see that. However, with 181 current members in our circle, we have some work to do to get even more activity. By the way, I ran across an interesting write up of some of the history of the CQWW DX contest on CQ's web site.
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The warm up for CQWW DX CW was pretty amazing on Thanksgiving Day. Normally, I have a house full of people here and am busy in the kitchen as the head cook. This year was different. Most of my family was out of state, and the rest were out of town. I was home alone. You know what that means. HAM RADIO! I could see the slow build up of DX on the bands earlier in the week but Thursday was amazing. Contesters were busy warming up, testing their stations and checking propagation all day. The bands were lit up despite a meager SFI of 69. There was choice DX operated by experienced contesters on everything from 20 meters through 160, with a few racking up QSOs on 17 and 15. I might have to invite the family to go out of state again next year! I didn't realize what I had been missing!
Last month we talked a little about the young guns from SCCC operating at ZF1A. Elsewhere, there is another batch of youngsters that are starting to make some noise. Team Exuberance, as they are known, are out to prove that contesting is not just for us older guys and gals. Violetta (KM4ATT), Bryant (KG5HVO), David (VE7DZO), Chris (KD8YVJ), Dhruv (KC9ZJX), Marty (KC1CWF) and possibly Mason (KM4SII) are going to be traveling with their parents to the K3LR super station in Pennsylvania to operate the CQ WPX SSB contest in late March. You've probably already worked some of these kids in recent contests. They are very active. Some have already had the good fortune of operating from some other big MM stations. These 14, 15 and 16 year olds are coming on strong. To help pay for their trip to PA, they have established a GoFundMe page with a goal of raising $5,000. As of early December, generous contesters have already donated about $3,000! I know that several of you have already donated. All funds will be used for transportation, hotels, meals and other trip expenses. If you'd like to help support these youngsters, visit Team Exuberance. And if you'd like to read about their excitement around contesting, look up their calls on QRZ.com.
John, KK9A posted on the CQ-Contest reflector last month about a video he had found on YouTube. It's the story of the N2AA MM operation in CQWW DX Phone at the K2GL super station back in about 1981. Their main competition? The famous W2PV MM group! It's a fascinating story, dating back to a time well before computers became a fixture in our ham stations. The video is posted elsewhere here on our web site. Enjoy...
A fascinating discussion about radios and microphones for SSB contesting also took place in November on that reflector. Once upon a recent time, good quality boom mic headsets were few and far between, and contesters generally settled on the one or two models out there. Nowadays, the selection is larger. And some say that even inexpensive headsets work well with modern transceivers that now have microphone equalization capabilities. I hadn't thought about that but it makes perfect sense. We all want a headset that is very comfortable. And it has to still be comfortable some 48 hours later (for those super long contests, right?). That is first and foremost but a very close second is one with contesting friendly transmit audio. Some have options to tailor the frequency response across one or more settings. However, modern rigs allow even more customization. There is a whole discussion about rolling off low frequencies and focusing transmit power on somewhat higher audio frequencies. There is some thought that doing so provides more punch and more output power in the desired audio range. I'll leave that to others to debate. Me personally, I am attracted to a more rounded sounding caller than one who has radically rolled off the lows. It's easier for me to pick out someone with well rounded audio in a pileup than one leaning toward tinny. Each to their own of course. That aside, the discussion on CQ-Contest has been interesting. In case you missed it, you can find it in their archives. I would love to hear from SCCCers on this subject on our reflector. To start the discussion, I have a Heil Pro-Set Plus and have really liked it over the years. I haven't fooled around with my rig's mic EQ yet but it might be time to do so! What about you?
Did you ever think you would see an FCC Chairman on a tower? In August, Chairman Ajit Pai (center) climbed to the top of a 130 foot cell phone tower near De Beque, CO. Naturally, he donned the appropriate safety gear. The self supporting tower is located off I-70 between Aspen and Grand Junction. “The Chairman’s site visit served to reinforce the prominent role communications tower owners, contractors and technicians continue to play in enabling connectivity to all sectors of our diverse economy,” stated David Sams, Vice President of Risk Management at SBA Communications. Republican Representative (TX) Pete Olson had recently asked Pai when he was going to climb a tower, reminding him that his colleague, Commissioner Brendan Carr had now scaled two towers. Mr. Pai joked that he might climb a 10 ft. tower, noting Carr's youth and fitness. (Carr had previously climbed a 2,000 ft. tower in Rowena, SD.) He later committed to climbing the 130 footer.
“It was an honor to have FCC Chairman Ajit Pai join us today at one of our company’s towers in Colorado,” said David Sams. “The Chairman’s site visit served to reinforce the prominent role communications tower owners, contractors and technicians continue to play in enabling connectivity to all sectors of our diverse economy.”
BIC. The acronym is well known by contesters. Billing Item Code? No. Barring Incoming Calls? No, but if we can figure out how to do so for the many robocallers, then YES! Best In Class. Well yeah, maybe, huh? Because I Can. Definitely! But none of those are what us contesters know BIC as. We know it as Butt in Chair. It has to do with being at the operating position as long as possible. If you aren't there, you aren't working the other guys. A good debate took place on the CQ-CONTEST reflector recently on operating chairs. As is often the case on that particular reflector, there were dozens of personal opinions. Some I agreed with and some I didn't. In the case of an operating chair in the shack, we need to find one that meets OUR needs. Comfortable. Not just initially when we sit down but after hours and hours of contesting. Sometimes we sit in that chair for a full 48 hours, or close to it. In such case, it had better be darned comfortable and not be killing our backs hours into it. High back, short back or medium back? Arm rests or no arm rests. These are personal preferences. As is the material. Leather? Faux leather? Cloth? While it's very interesting to hear and read about all of the personal opinions, only YOU can determine which chair fits the bill for you. I would only add this. Don't skimp on your chair. And don't hang onto an old chair that once was your favorite but is now causing some discomfort. We spend a good deal of money on our radios and on our antennas. We should never settle for a chair just because it was an incredible bargain. If you get a quality chair and one that is right for you, it will add to and prolong your enjoyment of the hobby. And you won't limp out of the ham shack after a few hours chasing contest Q's. Get a good one. BYC. Because You Can.
Strange but true...
You may be surprised to learn that a Boeing 747 jet is longer from wing tip to wing tip than the distance of the Wright Brothers' first airplane flight!
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Last month we talked a little about the young guns from SCCC operating at ZF1A. Elsewhere, there is another batch of youngsters that are starting to make some noise. Team Exuberance, as they are known, are out to prove that contesting is not just for us older guys and gals. Violetta (KM4ATT), Bryant (KG5HVO), David (VE7DZO), Chris (KD8YVJ), Dhruv (KC9ZJX), Marty (KC1CWF) and possibly Mason (KM4SII) are going to be traveling with their parents to the K3LR super station in Pennsylvania to operate the CQ WPX SSB contest in late March. You've probably already worked some of these kids in recent contests. They are very active. Some have already had the good fortune of operating from some other big MM stations. These 14, 15 and 16 year olds are coming on strong. To help pay for their trip to PA, they have established a GoFundMe page with a goal of raising $5,000. As of early December, generous contesters have already donated about $3,000! I know that several of you have already donated. All funds will be used for transportation, hotels, meals and other trip expenses. If you'd like to help support these youngsters, visit Team Exuberance. And if you'd like to read about their excitement around contesting, look up their calls on QRZ.com.
John, KK9A posted on the CQ-Contest reflector last month about a video he had found on YouTube. It's the story of the N2AA MM operation in CQWW DX Phone at the K2GL super station back in about 1981. Their main competition? The famous W2PV MM group! It's a fascinating story, dating back to a time well before computers became a fixture in our ham stations. The video is posted elsewhere here on our web site. Enjoy...
A fascinating discussion about radios and microphones for SSB contesting also took place in November on that reflector. Once upon a recent time, good quality boom mic headsets were few and far between, and contesters generally settled on the one or two models out there. Nowadays, the selection is larger. And some say that even inexpensive headsets work well with modern transceivers that now have microphone equalization capabilities. I hadn't thought about that but it makes perfect sense. We all want a headset that is very comfortable. And it has to still be comfortable some 48 hours later (for those super long contests, right?). That is first and foremost but a very close second is one with contesting friendly transmit audio. Some have options to tailor the frequency response across one or more settings. However, modern rigs allow even more customization. There is a whole discussion about rolling off low frequencies and focusing transmit power on somewhat higher audio frequencies. There is some thought that doing so provides more punch and more output power in the desired audio range. I'll leave that to others to debate. Me personally, I am attracted to a more rounded sounding caller than one who has radically rolled off the lows. It's easier for me to pick out someone with well rounded audio in a pileup than one leaning toward tinny. Each to their own of course. That aside, the discussion on CQ-Contest has been interesting. In case you missed it, you can find it in their archives. I would love to hear from SCCCers on this subject on our reflector. To start the discussion, I have a Heil Pro-Set Plus and have really liked it over the years. I haven't fooled around with my rig's mic EQ yet but it might be time to do so! What about you?
Did you ever think you would see an FCC Chairman on a tower? In August, Chairman Ajit Pai (center) climbed to the top of a 130 foot cell phone tower near De Beque, CO. Naturally, he donned the appropriate safety gear. The self supporting tower is located off I-70 between Aspen and Grand Junction. “The Chairman’s site visit served to reinforce the prominent role communications tower owners, contractors and technicians continue to play in enabling connectivity to all sectors of our diverse economy,” stated David Sams, Vice President of Risk Management at SBA Communications. Republican Representative (TX) Pete Olson had recently asked Pai when he was going to climb a tower, reminding him that his colleague, Commissioner Brendan Carr had now scaled two towers. Mr. Pai joked that he might climb a 10 ft. tower, noting Carr's youth and fitness. (Carr had previously climbed a 2,000 ft. tower in Rowena, SD.) He later committed to climbing the 130 footer.
“It was an honor to have FCC Chairman Ajit Pai join us today at one of our company’s towers in Colorado,” said David Sams. “The Chairman’s site visit served to reinforce the prominent role communications tower owners, contractors and technicians continue to play in enabling connectivity to all sectors of our diverse economy.”
BIC. The acronym is well known by contesters. Billing Item Code? No. Barring Incoming Calls? No, but if we can figure out how to do so for the many robocallers, then YES! Best In Class. Well yeah, maybe, huh? Because I Can. Definitely! But none of those are what us contesters know BIC as. We know it as Butt in Chair. It has to do with being at the operating position as long as possible. If you aren't there, you aren't working the other guys. A good debate took place on the CQ-CONTEST reflector recently on operating chairs. As is often the case on that particular reflector, there were dozens of personal opinions. Some I agreed with and some I didn't. In the case of an operating chair in the shack, we need to find one that meets OUR needs. Comfortable. Not just initially when we sit down but after hours and hours of contesting. Sometimes we sit in that chair for a full 48 hours, or close to it. In such case, it had better be darned comfortable and not be killing our backs hours into it. High back, short back or medium back? Arm rests or no arm rests. These are personal preferences. As is the material. Leather? Faux leather? Cloth? While it's very interesting to hear and read about all of the personal opinions, only YOU can determine which chair fits the bill for you. I would only add this. Don't skimp on your chair. And don't hang onto an old chair that once was your favorite but is now causing some discomfort. We spend a good deal of money on our radios and on our antennas. We should never settle for a chair just because it was an incredible bargain. If you get a quality chair and one that is right for you, it will add to and prolong your enjoyment of the hobby. And you won't limp out of the ham shack after a few hours chasing contest Q's. Get a good one. BYC. Because You Can.
Strange but true...
You may be surprised to learn that a Boeing 747 jet is longer from wing tip to wing tip than the distance of the Wright Brothers' first airplane flight!
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Monthly News (SCCCORE)
November 2018
Welcome aboard to new member Douglas, N6PZK who hails from Fallbrook. His first contest was the California QSO party back in 2013. He won the new contester category that year as KJ6ZQP. He's been hooked on contesting ever since! He moved to his current QTH a little over three years ago and has been constructing a new shack since that time. He loves both DXing and contesting. He is a member of SCDXC, the Los Angeles Amateur Radio Club as well as the Traveler Contest Club. He is a former marine and we thank him for his service.
The 2018 CQ WPX SSB results were published last month. Axel, KI6RRN placed second in the U.S. Single Op Low Power category. Alex, W6AFA was second USA 7 MHz High Power. Bill, W8QZA piloted W6QU to second USA Single Op All Band QRP. And Dick, W6TK took second in the 6th District All Band High Power. WN6K scored second SOABLP in the 6th District. Full results at CQ's Contest Results page.
The WRTC Sanctioning Committee has chosen the Bologna, Italy area as the location of the 2022 WRTC contest. The area is where Italian inventor and electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi was born. Marconi is known for his development of long distance radio telegraph. WRTC is a contest within the IARU contest and brings together many of the best contesters in the world to compete against each other on a level field using similar stations and antennas.
As many of you have heard, whether on the SCCC Reflector or any number of other places, Paul Bittner, W0AIH passed away on Wednesday, Oct 31 due to a tower accident. He had been working on his 15 meter tower when a pulley failed. Paul was an incredibly active contester and most of us have many, many contacts with him in our logs. Pictures of his incredible Wisconsin antenna farm can be viewed on his QRZ web page. The accident reminds all of us to always, ALWAYS work with the utmost safety in mind, no matter what we are doing. RIP Paul.
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The 2018 CQ WPX SSB results were published last month. Axel, KI6RRN placed second in the U.S. Single Op Low Power category. Alex, W6AFA was second USA 7 MHz High Power. Bill, W8QZA piloted W6QU to second USA Single Op All Band QRP. And Dick, W6TK took second in the 6th District All Band High Power. WN6K scored second SOABLP in the 6th District. Full results at CQ's Contest Results page.
The WRTC Sanctioning Committee has chosen the Bologna, Italy area as the location of the 2022 WRTC contest. The area is where Italian inventor and electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi was born. Marconi is known for his development of long distance radio telegraph. WRTC is a contest within the IARU contest and brings together many of the best contesters in the world to compete against each other on a level field using similar stations and antennas.
As many of you have heard, whether on the SCCC Reflector or any number of other places, Paul Bittner, W0AIH passed away on Wednesday, Oct 31 due to a tower accident. He had been working on his 15 meter tower when a pulley failed. Paul was an incredibly active contester and most of us have many, many contacts with him in our logs. Pictures of his incredible Wisconsin antenna farm can be viewed on his QRZ web page. The accident reminds all of us to always, ALWAYS work with the utmost safety in mind, no matter what we are doing. RIP Paul.
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You may not have heard but a group of young (compared to me anyway!) contesters, including some from the SCCC, headed to Cayman Islands in late October to operate the CQWW DX SSB contest as ZF1A. The group included N6MJ, KK6NON, KI6RRN, KI6SMX (KI6RRN's brother), N6WIN and JH1NBN. It's great to see some of the younger contesters getting to operate from the other side of the pile in such a large contest. For those that don't subscribe to the SCCC Reflector nor watch the comments on 3830scores.org, what follows is Dan N6MJ's comments on the experience.
A big thank you to Andrew, ZF1EJ, and CARS for allowing us to operate the contest from his home QTH on the beautiful island of Grand Cayman.
Originally Yuki, JH1NBN, was going to operate this contest as a M/S with Joe W6VNR. Joe did this contest from ZF for many years. Unfortunately Joe passed away earlier this year. He will be missed. I reached out to Yuki to see if he would like to team up with us and he was kind enough to allow us to join him. As we started to form the team, we decided to do a M/2 so we could invite some of the younger members of the club. Axel KI6RRN, Adams KI6SMX and Levi KK6NON are all low 20's or younger and were a big part of the team. It was nice to be able to involve some of the younger operators and give them a chance to operate from the DX side.
This was our first time operating from ZF1A as a M/2 in CQWW SSB. Most everyone was here for the first time. There was a ton of work to get done before the contest started. Luckily most of the operators were able to arrive either on Monday or Tuesday before the contest to get everything done. John K6AM wasn't able to join us onsite but he was on call as our technical advisor. He helped design the station layout and was able to walk us thru all the problems we encountered.
We were very fortunate to be sponsored by Icom. We were able to operate with 3 IC 7610's and everything worked great even in the tough multi op setting. In addition to that, Vibroplex allowed us to use the new Inrad W1 headsets for the contest. The headsets were a big hit and everyone was happy with their performance.
The biggest project was building and installing a C31XR that N6WIN donated to the station. It took many long hours but we finally had it up and running Friday morning. One of our team mates, Scott K7ZO, was unable to make it at the last minute. Fortunately he was still a valuable asset to the team and without his input we wouldn't have been able to get everything done. Hopefully he will be able to join us next year.
Conditions were great leading up to the contest. Some of that carried over to the contest, but 10m was mostly dead other than a short opening on Saturday. On Sunday, 15m was a real struggle until the afternoon when it finally opened all the way.
We hope to be able to come back again next year as everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves.
Thanks to everybody for the QSO's.
73,
Dan N6MJ
I reported some of this in the May issue but missed some pieces of the puzzle, so I'll restate it all again this month and try not to leave out any gaps. Congratulations to Wayne, N6NB who won the Classic Rover category in the ARRL January VHF Contest! Wayne visited 10 grids and operated on 11 bands. The ARRL writeup notes that he used FT8, which is unusual for a rover (yes, he used other modes as well). Also, congrats to John, K6MI who took the win in the Unlimited Rover category! John did 11 bands from 10 grids. Meanwhile, Bruce, KG6IYN set a new Single OP FM record in the Southwestern Divistion with a score of 8,172 by making 156 contacts on all four contest bands. Greg, W6IT set a new Single Op Low Power record in the Division with 31,196 points on all bands from 50 MHz to 10 GHz! And ahem, the SCCC took the Medium Club category this time around despite only five entrants! Our 563,408 score bested PVRC's 406,783. Great job! (We need to get more of you to use that 6 meter position on your band switch! And maybe some other bands...) The full contest write up can be found here.
The ARRL Contest Branch has announced that FT8 will be permitted in the 2019 ARRL RTTY Roundup. The next edition of this contest is in January. “Even though digital modes other than RTTY have been permitted in the RTTY Roundup for 30 years, FT8 was excluded in 2018, because it could not manage the required exchanges,” ARRL Contest Branch Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, said. “Through the work of the WSJT-X development team, the latest version of FT8 can handle the necessary exchanges that earlier versions were unable to do.” WSJT-X version 2.0 or later is required. Note that if you are currently running an earlier version, newer versions can be installed in their own folder and run separately without conflict of your older version. Just don't try to run them both at the same time. Full article is here on the web site. Be sure to pay attention to the DG versus RY mode designation in Cabrillo logs in the article.
From the SCDXC newsletter (October, 2018), Joe, K5KT was awarded lifetime membership into the South East LA Amateur Radio Club. That's LA as in Louisiana. The club is located near Joe's hometown of Hammond, LA. As we know, Joe has been an active contester from SoCal for many years.
The Visalia DX Convention attracts many of the top contesters and DXers from around the world, including many SCCCers.
2018 was no exception.
The full array of photos can be found here.
Photos courtesy N6TV
Strange but true...
Ever wonder why blue jeans are blue? When they were first designed by Levi Strauss, the people most likely to wear them were those who did a great deal of manual labor. Strauss rightly assumed the work was likely to be dirty, so he dyed his new trousers indigo to help hide stains.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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A big thank you to Andrew, ZF1EJ, and CARS for allowing us to operate the contest from his home QTH on the beautiful island of Grand Cayman.
Originally Yuki, JH1NBN, was going to operate this contest as a M/S with Joe W6VNR. Joe did this contest from ZF for many years. Unfortunately Joe passed away earlier this year. He will be missed. I reached out to Yuki to see if he would like to team up with us and he was kind enough to allow us to join him. As we started to form the team, we decided to do a M/2 so we could invite some of the younger members of the club. Axel KI6RRN, Adams KI6SMX and Levi KK6NON are all low 20's or younger and were a big part of the team. It was nice to be able to involve some of the younger operators and give them a chance to operate from the DX side.
This was our first time operating from ZF1A as a M/2 in CQWW SSB. Most everyone was here for the first time. There was a ton of work to get done before the contest started. Luckily most of the operators were able to arrive either on Monday or Tuesday before the contest to get everything done. John K6AM wasn't able to join us onsite but he was on call as our technical advisor. He helped design the station layout and was able to walk us thru all the problems we encountered.
We were very fortunate to be sponsored by Icom. We were able to operate with 3 IC 7610's and everything worked great even in the tough multi op setting. In addition to that, Vibroplex allowed us to use the new Inrad W1 headsets for the contest. The headsets were a big hit and everyone was happy with their performance.
The biggest project was building and installing a C31XR that N6WIN donated to the station. It took many long hours but we finally had it up and running Friday morning. One of our team mates, Scott K7ZO, was unable to make it at the last minute. Fortunately he was still a valuable asset to the team and without his input we wouldn't have been able to get everything done. Hopefully he will be able to join us next year.
Conditions were great leading up to the contest. Some of that carried over to the contest, but 10m was mostly dead other than a short opening on Saturday. On Sunday, 15m was a real struggle until the afternoon when it finally opened all the way.
We hope to be able to come back again next year as everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves.
Thanks to everybody for the QSO's.
73,
Dan N6MJ
I reported some of this in the May issue but missed some pieces of the puzzle, so I'll restate it all again this month and try not to leave out any gaps. Congratulations to Wayne, N6NB who won the Classic Rover category in the ARRL January VHF Contest! Wayne visited 10 grids and operated on 11 bands. The ARRL writeup notes that he used FT8, which is unusual for a rover (yes, he used other modes as well). Also, congrats to John, K6MI who took the win in the Unlimited Rover category! John did 11 bands from 10 grids. Meanwhile, Bruce, KG6IYN set a new Single OP FM record in the Southwestern Divistion with a score of 8,172 by making 156 contacts on all four contest bands. Greg, W6IT set a new Single Op Low Power record in the Division with 31,196 points on all bands from 50 MHz to 10 GHz! And ahem, the SCCC took the Medium Club category this time around despite only five entrants! Our 563,408 score bested PVRC's 406,783. Great job! (We need to get more of you to use that 6 meter position on your band switch! And maybe some other bands...) The full contest write up can be found here.
The ARRL Contest Branch has announced that FT8 will be permitted in the 2019 ARRL RTTY Roundup. The next edition of this contest is in January. “Even though digital modes other than RTTY have been permitted in the RTTY Roundup for 30 years, FT8 was excluded in 2018, because it could not manage the required exchanges,” ARRL Contest Branch Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, said. “Through the work of the WSJT-X development team, the latest version of FT8 can handle the necessary exchanges that earlier versions were unable to do.” WSJT-X version 2.0 or later is required. Note that if you are currently running an earlier version, newer versions can be installed in their own folder and run separately without conflict of your older version. Just don't try to run them both at the same time. Full article is here on the web site. Be sure to pay attention to the DG versus RY mode designation in Cabrillo logs in the article.
From the SCDXC newsletter (October, 2018), Joe, K5KT was awarded lifetime membership into the South East LA Amateur Radio Club. That's LA as in Louisiana. The club is located near Joe's hometown of Hammond, LA. As we know, Joe has been an active contester from SoCal for many years.
2018 was no exception.
The full array of photos can be found here.
Photos courtesy N6TV
Strange but true...
Ever wonder why blue jeans are blue? When they were first designed by Levi Strauss, the people most likely to wear them were those who did a great deal of manual labor. Strauss rightly assumed the work was likely to be dirty, so he dyed his new trousers indigo to help hide stains.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Monthly News (SCCCORE)
October 2018
Welcome aboard to five new members this month!
Endaf, N6UTC was first licensed in 1997 with the callsign of MW1BQO. Four years later, he came to the USA and obtained the call KG6FIY. His current callsign is much more interesting. He enjoys the various data modes and is active on VHF.
Jaxon, N0XNN is in San Diego and currently lives in military housing. He's relatively new to contesting and looks forward to expanding his contest knowledge.
Tony, N6OO is an occasional contester and enjoys DXing and QRP. He joined us just in time for last month's NA Sprint SSB.
Angus, KA6AIL joins us from the high desert in Palmdale (near my old stomping grounds of Lancaster). Angus enjoys CQP and some of the QRP contests.
Bill, KB6WKT has been involved in every Field Day since 1988! He has also participated in VHF/UHF, RTTY and HF contests over the years.
NAQP SSB preliminary results have been published on the NCJ web site. This is not one SCCC participates in heavily. SCCC #2 is 13th and SCCC #1 is 15th. SMC #1 ran away with the thing, posting nearly 568K points. The runner up, SMC #2 had 383K. SCCC teams did not crack 100K. That said, SCCCers took the top three spots in California, with W6AFA narrowly topping WN6K. K5KT took the third spot.
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Endaf, N6UTC was first licensed in 1997 with the callsign of MW1BQO. Four years later, he came to the USA and obtained the call KG6FIY. His current callsign is much more interesting. He enjoys the various data modes and is active on VHF.
Jaxon, N0XNN is in San Diego and currently lives in military housing. He's relatively new to contesting and looks forward to expanding his contest knowledge.
Tony, N6OO is an occasional contester and enjoys DXing and QRP. He joined us just in time for last month's NA Sprint SSB.
Angus, KA6AIL joins us from the high desert in Palmdale (near my old stomping grounds of Lancaster). Angus enjoys CQP and some of the QRP contests.
Bill, KB6WKT has been involved in every Field Day since 1988! He has also participated in VHF/UHF, RTTY and HF contests over the years.
NAQP SSB preliminary results have been published on the NCJ web site. This is not one SCCC participates in heavily. SCCC #2 is 13th and SCCC #1 is 15th. SMC #1 ran away with the thing, posting nearly 568K points. The runner up, SMC #2 had 383K. SCCC teams did not crack 100K. That said, SCCCers took the top three spots in California, with W6AFA narrowly topping WN6K. K5KT took the third spot.
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The 2018 CQWW 160 meter contest results have also come out. By all accounts, it was pretty tough slogging this year. Glenn, K6NA took third place on CW in Zone 3. Alex, W6AFA finished sixth in Zone 3 on SSB. SCCC posted just under 1.6 million points with 17 entries.
Another blast from the past. This is the HQ3Z QSL from the 2008 CQWW DX Phone contest. The operation included Marty N6VI, Dick N6AA, Wild Bill Wiederhold WB6BFG, and Art W6XD. Arlen K6VNX is the QSL manager for this operation.
Just before the September NA Sprint CW, K6NA contacted me to join a team but told me he was going to be operating with a "hobo-setup." He explained that a pipe had burst under the sink. Naturally, that happened while they were away for a five hour outing. They had to remove everything in the house as well as the ham shack to let things dry out. So Glenn had set up a "hobo" station in his 95 degree garage. He is used to a much more advanced set up, so I could feel his pain as he explained, "I have manual antenna switching only, 100ft away from the op position. Most of my convenience details can't be used, except at least I have PC logging. Also I have an amp that works, BUT no station ground and no time to check for 'new' RFI, so things could fall apart in a hurry if some kind of RFI problem rears up."
His 3830/SCCC reflector summary explains the "hobo" contest experience. "Shack is fully dismantled for remodeling the house. Wanted to participate in Sprint, so extended some feedlines into the garage. No amp, so set up Low Power FT5000 and a folding chair, in the 101-degree heat. PC logging ok, but no other automatic-anything-else, or conveniences like selecting different antennas within a band. Of course, typical K6NA scramble and late start; first QSO logged at 0051z - duh. Sorry for the clunky exchanges at first, hadn't checked my function-key file - another duh. New respect for the LP and QRP guys who slug it out in Sprint: My CQs were mostly lost in the QRM. Settled mostly on S&P in order to work couplets on a channel, but lost out during many of the jump-balls. Band conditions? Very well described by many others; no need to repeat here. 73, Glen K6NA"
Hats off to Glenn for recording 188 Q's, 39 mults, and 7,322 points under seriously adverse conditions! The rest of us no longer have any excuse!
There was an article in the September/October 2018 issue of the National Contest Journal that I found very eye opening. It's titled "Radiosport 2.0: Predictions About the Future of Radio Contesting." No, it's not another article bemoaning the dearth of young contesters. It's a summary of a talk held at the VIsalia International DX Convention. K3LR, AI6TK, K6WX, W5ZN, K6TD and N9ADG talked about their predictions for the future of contesting. The article's author, K0MD described them as both exciting and disruptive! Things such as mandatory real time online logs, a contest category where a single operator is managing up to five computer/radio combinations at the same time, awards and merit badges that measure personal progress (to encourage the casual contesters to get more active), WRTC having operators switch stations virtually every ten minutes to level the playing field even more and several other interesting thoughts. Get your hands on a copy of this issue if you haven't already. As a bonus, there is an article about some US contesters evaluating their transceivers. I found that one particularly interesting as well.
I'm a little late with this but it has just come to my attention that Kip Edwards, W6SZN passed away this past June. Kip was an active contester and DXer. He is a past President of NCCC, past Director of NCDXF and past Secretary of the Yasme Foundation. He was also a regular financial supporter of DXpeditions. You'd often find his call on that list for many a rare one. His call appears in the list for the upcoming VP6D DXpeditons for example. Many of us will find his call regularly in our contest logs too. Bottom line, Kip is one that enjoyed our hobby to the fullest and gave back regularly. Our condolences to Kip's family for their loss. We in the amateur radio will miss him too.
The annual Six Meter BBQ was held September 21 and 22 in Austin, TX. There are always some interesting presentations for 6 meter enthusiasts. This year, there was also an informative one on grounding and bonding that applies to HF as well as VHF/UHF stations. It's well worth the read. Find all of the 2018 and 2017 presentations in PDF format here.
The California QSO Party is coming October 6-7. Last year, we as a club took first place in the Medium Club category (34 entries) and earned a plaque! Really, we should be able to win this every year! Right? Let's get on and rock it again this year! We are the DX in this contest! Rules can be found at CQP.org.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Another blast from the past. This is the HQ3Z QSL from the 2008 CQWW DX Phone contest. The operation included Marty N6VI, Dick N6AA, Wild Bill Wiederhold WB6BFG, and Art W6XD. Arlen K6VNX is the QSL manager for this operation.
Just before the September NA Sprint CW, K6NA contacted me to join a team but told me he was going to be operating with a "hobo-setup." He explained that a pipe had burst under the sink. Naturally, that happened while they were away for a five hour outing. They had to remove everything in the house as well as the ham shack to let things dry out. So Glenn had set up a "hobo" station in his 95 degree garage. He is used to a much more advanced set up, so I could feel his pain as he explained, "I have manual antenna switching only, 100ft away from the op position. Most of my convenience details can't be used, except at least I have PC logging. Also I have an amp that works, BUT no station ground and no time to check for 'new' RFI, so things could fall apart in a hurry if some kind of RFI problem rears up."
His 3830/SCCC reflector summary explains the "hobo" contest experience. "Shack is fully dismantled for remodeling the house. Wanted to participate in Sprint, so extended some feedlines into the garage. No amp, so set up Low Power FT5000 and a folding chair, in the 101-degree heat. PC logging ok, but no other automatic-anything-else, or conveniences like selecting different antennas within a band. Of course, typical K6NA scramble and late start; first QSO logged at 0051z - duh. Sorry for the clunky exchanges at first, hadn't checked my function-key file - another duh. New respect for the LP and QRP guys who slug it out in Sprint: My CQs were mostly lost in the QRM. Settled mostly on S&P in order to work couplets on a channel, but lost out during many of the jump-balls. Band conditions? Very well described by many others; no need to repeat here. 73, Glen K6NA"
Hats off to Glenn for recording 188 Q's, 39 mults, and 7,322 points under seriously adverse conditions! The rest of us no longer have any excuse!
There was an article in the September/October 2018 issue of the National Contest Journal that I found very eye opening. It's titled "Radiosport 2.0: Predictions About the Future of Radio Contesting." No, it's not another article bemoaning the dearth of young contesters. It's a summary of a talk held at the VIsalia International DX Convention. K3LR, AI6TK, K6WX, W5ZN, K6TD and N9ADG talked about their predictions for the future of contesting. The article's author, K0MD described them as both exciting and disruptive! Things such as mandatory real time online logs, a contest category where a single operator is managing up to five computer/radio combinations at the same time, awards and merit badges that measure personal progress (to encourage the casual contesters to get more active), WRTC having operators switch stations virtually every ten minutes to level the playing field even more and several other interesting thoughts. Get your hands on a copy of this issue if you haven't already. As a bonus, there is an article about some US contesters evaluating their transceivers. I found that one particularly interesting as well.
I'm a little late with this but it has just come to my attention that Kip Edwards, W6SZN passed away this past June. Kip was an active contester and DXer. He is a past President of NCCC, past Director of NCDXF and past Secretary of the Yasme Foundation. He was also a regular financial supporter of DXpeditions. You'd often find his call on that list for many a rare one. His call appears in the list for the upcoming VP6D DXpeditons for example. Many of us will find his call regularly in our contest logs too. Bottom line, Kip is one that enjoyed our hobby to the fullest and gave back regularly. Our condolences to Kip's family for their loss. We in the amateur radio will miss him too.
The annual Six Meter BBQ was held September 21 and 22 in Austin, TX. There are always some interesting presentations for 6 meter enthusiasts. This year, there was also an informative one on grounding and bonding that applies to HF as well as VHF/UHF stations. It's well worth the read. Find all of the 2018 and 2017 presentations in PDF format here.
The California QSO Party is coming October 6-7. Last year, we as a club took first place in the Medium Club category (34 entries) and earned a plaque! Really, we should be able to win this every year! Right? Let's get on and rock it again this year! We are the DX in this contest! Rules can be found at CQP.org.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Monthly News (SCCCORE)
September 2018
The Southern California DX Club (SCDXC) held it's annual Summer Bash on August 12 in La Habra, and was attended by many who are also SCCCers. This photo was sent to me by Terry N6CW. Click on it for a full size rendition, and see how many SCCCers you can spot. See if you can spot the SCCCer wearing his So Cal Contest Club badge!
The preliminary July NAQP RTTY results have been published on the NCJ web site. KI6RRN placed 5th overall, and the SCCC #1 team took 5th in the team category with 174,935 points.
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The following was published in the Ohio/Penn DX Bulleting (No. 1378) on 27 Aug 2018.
YASME PRESS RELEASE (dated August 21st). THE YASME FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES
ELECTION OF A NEW DIRECTOR -- The Board of Directors of The Yasme Foundation
is pleased to announce that it has elected Marty Woll, N6VI, as the newest
Yasme Foundation Director. Marty brings a wealth of experience in ham
radio including nine years of service as Vice-Director for the ARRL South-
western Division and Life Member of ARRL, past president of the Southern
California DX Club, past president of the Los Angeles Area Council of Radio
Clubs, past chair of the ARRL’s Contest Advisory Committee, and founding
member of the Southern California Contest Club.
Marty is also active in public service as Training Officer for the Los
Angeles Fire Department's Auxiliary Communications Service. He authored
a chapter of the ARRL's Introduction to Emergency Communications course
and is a popular speaker at clubs and conventions.
While on the subject of announcements, John Dorr K1AR announced on August 28 that Ken K4ZW decided to step down as czar of the popular Contest Webinars sponsored by WWROF (World Wide Radio Operators Foundation). Former SCCCer Mark Beckwitch N5OT (ex WA6OTU) will be taking over for Ken. Mark was first licensed in 1971 as WN6OTU. He has been both a successful single-operator at HC8U, K6RR, W6AQ, W8JI, W6UE and his own contest station, and a multi-operator team member at such stations as HC8N, PJ2T, TI5N and PJ4R. In addition to his ham radio pursuits, Mark is also a free-lance choir director, orchestra conductor and stage director. Needless to say, the Webinar program will be in capable hands.
NEW this month is the SCCC Monthly Poll. Be sure to visit it on our home page (just above the link to the monthly news) each month. Should be fun to see the results! It is totally anonymous.
Other preliminary contest results...The August 2018 NAQP CW. Our SCCC #1 team placed #4 in the team results! N5ZO is atop in the sixth district and KI6RRN is fourth. N6WIN, K6NR and W6TK also appear in the top ten in California. Awesome showing!
Tim Duffy, K3LR has posted some papers from the Antenna Forum at the 2018 Daytom Hamvention. A five element parasitic rotatable vertical yagi for 160 meters?! I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it! Plus three other articles. He also has others dating back to 2004 on the web site. A PDF reader is required.
The authors of WSJT-X software are busy working on Version 2.0, and it has some nice enhancements to FT8 and MSK144 for contesters. It's amazing how quickly this software is evolving and improving. Read up on what is in store at the WSJT-X web site.
"Back in the day," 4U1UN, the United Nations Amateur Radio Club headquartered in New York City was often heard in DX contests. They were an easy snag for USA contesters and DXers alike. However, the station has been mostly silent for many, many years. Their QRZ web page mentions a weekend operation in October of 2015 as 4U70UN. W6ISQ wrote an article that appeared in the July 1989 issue of QST that is pretty interesting. 4U1UN is now #34 on the DXCC Most Wanted List. Let's hope 4U1UN returns to the air soon and provides many contest QSOs and helps fill in some DXCC slots. (Rumor has it the station was on very briefly last month doing some on air testing.)
Yaesu was set to announce a 200 watt version of its upcoming 101 transceiver at the Tokyo Hamvention in late August, billed as the FT-101MP. The two SDRs will be otherwise similar, rumor has it, with features such as:
9MHz IF Roofing Filter Producing Excellent Shape Factor
400MHz HRDDS (High Resolution Direct Digital Synthesizer)
Hybrid SDR: Direct Sampling & NBW (Narrow Bandwidth) SDR
Completely Independent Dual Receivers
High-Q VC Tuning Front-End
YAESU Renowned Interference Reduction System
Large Touch-Panel Precision Color Display
3DSS (Three Dimension Spectrum Stream) Waterfall Display
Active Band Indicator with LED illumination of the operating band, enables rapid band changes
MPVD (Multi-Purpose VFO Outer Dial) provides Sub VFO dial, Clarifier operation. VC-TUNE adjustment, VFO fine tuning or a CS (custoin selection) funiction
A blast from the past...
This is the JY7Z QSL (above) from the 1986 CQWW DX Phone contest. Among the group of operators were Dick N6AA, Phil N6ZZ (SK), Jim N6TJ, Terry W6MKB (now K6JL) and Marty N6VI. Others were JY3ZH, JY4MB, JY4YJ and W6NV.
Special thanks to Arlen K6VNX for providing the QSL for publication.
Have you ever sampled any of the many amateur radio Podcasts? It seems that the number of Podcasters is growing by the month. These Podcasts cover any number of interesting subjects, including contesting of course! For example, Eric, 4Z1UG has had many distinguished contesters on his Podcast "QSO Today"). There are many other podcasts as well. 100 Watts And A Wire, Ham Talk Live!, and ARRL's The Doctor Is In are just a few of the many Podcasts out there. Some have more contesting subject matter / guests than others but they all offer some interesting subject matter. You can access these through your smart phone, tablet, or computer free of charge. They are typically available via iTunes, the Google Playstore and/or other sources. And by the way, since I mentioned K3LR above, I should mention that that he was on QSO Today episode 038. It was a good one! If you haven't checked out Podcasts yet, you're missing some interesting stuff! I find it to be a great alternative to morning talk shows on FM radio during my drive to and from the office every day.
Are you subscribed to the SCCC Reflector? If not, why not?! It's a good source of information; a good place to ask questions; a good place to talk about contesting; a good place to be! Reflector posts come to the email address that you sign up with, and can be configured to come one at a time or in a daily digest. Frankly, we don't get so much traffic that the daily digest is necessary in my opinion but you may feel otherwise. To get yourself subscribed, click on this link.
Need to get your contest fix during a non-major contest weekend?! Don't we all?! As I write this on the last weekend of August, there are ten contests going on. Four are stateside QSO Parties, always good for some rate as well as good S&P practice. Hit our QSO Party button on this page or check out Bruce's WA7BNM Contest Calendar to get your contest fix.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Monthly News (SCCCORE)
August 2018
Welcome aboard to new SCCC member K0XP. Steve moved to Mission Viejo after 34 years on the east coast. He loves low band DXing and contesting as well as VHF contesting. He operates mostly CW. He says he was among those at the very first SCCC meeting.
Also, welcome to Wyatt, AI6V (formerly KK6RDY). Wyatt now has the call formerly held by Carl Cook, who passed away in December, 2014. Wyatt is a senior in high school and is President of the radio club there. He operates in most of the big contests.
In June, I shared the Dayton releases by Kenwood and Yaesu. Not to be overlooked is another release, this one by Heil Sound. The company announced its new BM-17 lightweight headset. It's available as either a single-side or dual-side model, and is available with either a dynamic mic element or an electret. The headset has many features that will make it attractive to amateur radio operators, contesters and DXers alike. Read more about these headsets at Heil Sound.
According to an ARRL announcement on 16 July 2018, Dan Craig, N6MJ, and Chris Hurlbut, KL9A, who operated as Y82V took third place in the recent WRTC contest. They racked up 506,461 points, putting 3,769 CW contacts and 1,052 phone contacts into their log. Chris posted recordings of their entire Y82V 24 hour operation and the log here. Caution, Google will be unable to scan for viruses due to the file size. I would suggest you download the audio files and scan them with your own anti-virus software just to be safe. (I'm personally pretty careful/anal about this stuff.)
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In the February NAQP RTTY contest, SCCC #1 placed 9th overall. KI6RRN, K6PO, WN6K and KA6WKE logged 172,932 points. KI6RRN finished in 9th place with 101,908 points!
In the February NA Sprint CW, SCCC #1 finished 4th, scoring 56,005 points! It was N6WIN, N6AA, N5ZO, K6LA and AC6T driving the bus on that team. SCCC #2 (K6AW, K6PO, W4EF and NE6I) finished 16th with 21,702 points. Tim, N6WIN finished 3rd in California posting 13,156 points. 20 meters was only open a short time for this one, so 40 and 80 were the money bands. Good show, guys! Some good scores in the results!
In the January NAQP CW, KI6RRN operating at K6NA and using Glenn's call took 4th place overall with 318,886 points! N5ZO was right behind him, finishing 5th with 303,580 points! K6LA finished 4th in California at 185,444. The SCCC #2 team placed 11th overall with 769,102 points. SCCC #1 was 13th 737,513 (only 4 of 5 members submitted logs).
KI6RRN placed 5th in the 2018 CQWW WPX RTTY contest in the USA all band low power category. SCCC had 19 entries and 3,3333,848 points.
Axel also placed 7th in the 2018 ARRL RTTY Roundup in the single op low power category (and tops in W6). K6LL took top honors in the single op unlimited high power category! N6ZFO placed 8th in W6 in the all band high power category. The club had 8 entrants and 212,805 points.
Conditions have definitely left something to be desired so far this year, so all of these scores are especially impressive.
Contest University has published many of the videos from the 2018 sessions. You can find them on their web site at www.contestuniversity.com
On a humorous note, we ran off on a Palm Springs getaway during the CQWW VHF Contest weekend (July 21-22). I figured I'd slip in a few afternoon QSOs when we got home Sunday so I turned the rig on Thursday night to see how the band was doing. Ugh! Receive was fine but there was no transmit audio using WSJT-X! It was working a few days earlier so I started checking my settings and cables. Nothing seemed to cure it. I only had a couple of hours Friday morning to troubleshoot before heading out on the trip with the XYL. I frantically tried this and tried that between packing my bag and loading the truck. Nothing seemed to work. I normally run a Rigblaster so I tried using the internal PC sound card and listened for audio on the output jack of that card. VOILA! I had audio there. Could the Rigblaster have gone south on me? Sure seemed like it. I rebooted it and double checked the cable connections. Nada. I tried reloading the driver for it but that didn't work either. Drat. And now I was out of time. I powered everything down and headed out for a weekend of sun, pool time and adult beverages. I returned Sunday to a parched yard (heat wave in SoCal ramping up!). After watering the thirsty lawn and plants and unpacking from the trip, I sat down at the computer to update the SCCC web page with the NAQP RTTY results. Then I turned on the rig and opened WSJT-X. I changed the settings back from the internal PC sound card to the Rigblaster. And VOILA! All was working again! Who knows what gave there but I was pretty darned happy! Maybe the cat got bored, did some troubleshooting in my radio room, and fixed the problem. I dunno, but I'm not going to complain! I clicked the NA VHF Contest box in the software (thanks for the reminder from N6GP on the SCCC reflector!) and started CQing. In short oder, N6QQ answered. We did the contest exchange and I logged the QSO. This at 2135Z. As I started CQing again, I checked WA7BNM's Contest Calendar to look up the contest. Double Drat! The contest had ended 35 minutes earlier at 2100Z! Oh well, at least the software was working again...
Speaking of VHF contests, there has been much discussion on various reflectors, forums and in the mags lately about FT8 usurping VHF activity, especially on 6 meters. While much slower than CW and SSB, the mode allows for QSOs up to -24 dB S/N! That gives it a distinct advantage over the other two modes from a signal level standpoint. This has driven an amazing increase in activity on all bands, 6 meters included. Many have lamented that most contesters are no longer bothering to tune CW and SSB portions of the band, or at least spending very little time there. It's probably not hard to understand why. Contesting is about making QSOs at the highest rate possible. While no one would argue that FT8 is slower than CW and SSB, no one would argue that FT8 has a distinct signal level advantage. And many (most? all?) of the little pistols and casual contesters are spending most of the contest on FT8. So where do the serious contesters go? To where the QSOs are of course. And right now on VHF, that's FT8 (and to a lesser extent, MSK144). That said, it might be a good thing if we agreed to check the CW and SSB portion of the band at some point every hour. I'm mostly talking about 6 meters here but this applies to the higher frequency bands as well. Perhaps at the 30 minute mark. This strategy has been used with great success on other bands long before FT8 came along. In SoCal, we used to tune a narrow segment of 10m during down years of the sunspot cycle and work each other fast and furiously. We've also done this in CQP years ago, tuning 40 and 80 meters during the day at a pre-determined time when propagation was very short on those bands. We were able to log dozens of "local" contacts that we would never had logged at night, or that would have just "got in the way" of working longer distances. So this technique is not unprecedented. Give it some thought and talk it up on the SCCC reflector. It's a very healthy discussion with FT8 storming the bands and contesters figuring out how to leverage it while balancing it with the legacy modes.
By the way, the developers of WSJT-X are working hard on version 2.0, currently expected to be released in mid to late September. The new version addresses some VHF contest issues currently being experienced. For example, if only one of the users in a VHF contest QSO has the "NA VHF Contest" box checked, exchanges do not work properly. Additionally, rovers (who of course need to append /R to their callsign) have had trouble running FT8 and MSK144. By increasing the number of bits from 72 to 77 in the transmission, the developers are able to cure both ills. And there are other benefits anticipated. You can read more about this at this site.
Parting shot.
You probably won't be surprised to learn that it was Albert Einstein who made the following sage observation: "A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it."
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Also, welcome to Wyatt, AI6V (formerly KK6RDY). Wyatt now has the call formerly held by Carl Cook, who passed away in December, 2014. Wyatt is a senior in high school and is President of the radio club there. He operates in most of the big contests.
In June, I shared the Dayton releases by Kenwood and Yaesu. Not to be overlooked is another release, this one by Heil Sound. The company announced its new BM-17 lightweight headset. It's available as either a single-side or dual-side model, and is available with either a dynamic mic element or an electret. The headset has many features that will make it attractive to amateur radio operators, contesters and DXers alike. Read more about these headsets at Heil Sound.
According to an ARRL announcement on 16 July 2018, Dan Craig, N6MJ, and Chris Hurlbut, KL9A, who operated as Y82V took third place in the recent WRTC contest. They racked up 506,461 points, putting 3,769 CW contacts and 1,052 phone contacts into their log. Chris posted recordings of their entire Y82V 24 hour operation and the log here. Caution, Google will be unable to scan for viruses due to the file size. I would suggest you download the audio files and scan them with your own anti-virus software just to be safe. (I'm personally pretty careful/anal about this stuff.)
more
In the February NAQP RTTY contest, SCCC #1 placed 9th overall. KI6RRN, K6PO, WN6K and KA6WKE logged 172,932 points. KI6RRN finished in 9th place with 101,908 points!
In the February NA Sprint CW, SCCC #1 finished 4th, scoring 56,005 points! It was N6WIN, N6AA, N5ZO, K6LA and AC6T driving the bus on that team. SCCC #2 (K6AW, K6PO, W4EF and NE6I) finished 16th with 21,702 points. Tim, N6WIN finished 3rd in California posting 13,156 points. 20 meters was only open a short time for this one, so 40 and 80 were the money bands. Good show, guys! Some good scores in the results!
In the January NAQP CW, KI6RRN operating at K6NA and using Glenn's call took 4th place overall with 318,886 points! N5ZO was right behind him, finishing 5th with 303,580 points! K6LA finished 4th in California at 185,444. The SCCC #2 team placed 11th overall with 769,102 points. SCCC #1 was 13th 737,513 (only 4 of 5 members submitted logs).
KI6RRN placed 5th in the 2018 CQWW WPX RTTY contest in the USA all band low power category. SCCC had 19 entries and 3,3333,848 points.
Axel also placed 7th in the 2018 ARRL RTTY Roundup in the single op low power category (and tops in W6). K6LL took top honors in the single op unlimited high power category! N6ZFO placed 8th in W6 in the all band high power category. The club had 8 entrants and 212,805 points.
Conditions have definitely left something to be desired so far this year, so all of these scores are especially impressive.
Contest University has published many of the videos from the 2018 sessions. You can find them on their web site at www.contestuniversity.com
On a humorous note, we ran off on a Palm Springs getaway during the CQWW VHF Contest weekend (July 21-22). I figured I'd slip in a few afternoon QSOs when we got home Sunday so I turned the rig on Thursday night to see how the band was doing. Ugh! Receive was fine but there was no transmit audio using WSJT-X! It was working a few days earlier so I started checking my settings and cables. Nothing seemed to cure it. I only had a couple of hours Friday morning to troubleshoot before heading out on the trip with the XYL. I frantically tried this and tried that between packing my bag and loading the truck. Nothing seemed to work. I normally run a Rigblaster so I tried using the internal PC sound card and listened for audio on the output jack of that card. VOILA! I had audio there. Could the Rigblaster have gone south on me? Sure seemed like it. I rebooted it and double checked the cable connections. Nada. I tried reloading the driver for it but that didn't work either. Drat. And now I was out of time. I powered everything down and headed out for a weekend of sun, pool time and adult beverages. I returned Sunday to a parched yard (heat wave in SoCal ramping up!). After watering the thirsty lawn and plants and unpacking from the trip, I sat down at the computer to update the SCCC web page with the NAQP RTTY results. Then I turned on the rig and opened WSJT-X. I changed the settings back from the internal PC sound card to the Rigblaster. And VOILA! All was working again! Who knows what gave there but I was pretty darned happy! Maybe the cat got bored, did some troubleshooting in my radio room, and fixed the problem. I dunno, but I'm not going to complain! I clicked the NA VHF Contest box in the software (thanks for the reminder from N6GP on the SCCC reflector!) and started CQing. In short oder, N6QQ answered. We did the contest exchange and I logged the QSO. This at 2135Z. As I started CQing again, I checked WA7BNM's Contest Calendar to look up the contest. Double Drat! The contest had ended 35 minutes earlier at 2100Z! Oh well, at least the software was working again...
Speaking of VHF contests, there has been much discussion on various reflectors, forums and in the mags lately about FT8 usurping VHF activity, especially on 6 meters. While much slower than CW and SSB, the mode allows for QSOs up to -24 dB S/N! That gives it a distinct advantage over the other two modes from a signal level standpoint. This has driven an amazing increase in activity on all bands, 6 meters included. Many have lamented that most contesters are no longer bothering to tune CW and SSB portions of the band, or at least spending very little time there. It's probably not hard to understand why. Contesting is about making QSOs at the highest rate possible. While no one would argue that FT8 is slower than CW and SSB, no one would argue that FT8 has a distinct signal level advantage. And many (most? all?) of the little pistols and casual contesters are spending most of the contest on FT8. So where do the serious contesters go? To where the QSOs are of course. And right now on VHF, that's FT8 (and to a lesser extent, MSK144). That said, it might be a good thing if we agreed to check the CW and SSB portion of the band at some point every hour. I'm mostly talking about 6 meters here but this applies to the higher frequency bands as well. Perhaps at the 30 minute mark. This strategy has been used with great success on other bands long before FT8 came along. In SoCal, we used to tune a narrow segment of 10m during down years of the sunspot cycle and work each other fast and furiously. We've also done this in CQP years ago, tuning 40 and 80 meters during the day at a pre-determined time when propagation was very short on those bands. We were able to log dozens of "local" contacts that we would never had logged at night, or that would have just "got in the way" of working longer distances. So this technique is not unprecedented. Give it some thought and talk it up on the SCCC reflector. It's a very healthy discussion with FT8 storming the bands and contesters figuring out how to leverage it while balancing it with the legacy modes.
By the way, the developers of WSJT-X are working hard on version 2.0, currently expected to be released in mid to late September. The new version addresses some VHF contest issues currently being experienced. For example, if only one of the users in a VHF contest QSO has the "NA VHF Contest" box checked, exchanges do not work properly. Additionally, rovers (who of course need to append /R to their callsign) have had trouble running FT8 and MSK144. By increasing the number of bits from 72 to 77 in the transmission, the developers are able to cure both ills. And there are other benefits anticipated. You can read more about this at this site.
Parting shot.
You probably won't be surprised to learn that it was Albert Einstein who made the following sage observation: "A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it."
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Monthly News (SCCCORE)
July 2018
Our condolensces to family and friends of Joe Hypnarowski, W6VNR/ZF2AH. Joe passed away June 6 at 3:00 am at UCSD Jacobs ICU in La Jolla. While not currently a member of SCCC, he provided many contest QSOs over the years as ZF2AH, V3CQ, C5ABZ, T32AH and many other call signs. Joe was a member of the Southern California DX Club. A celebration of his life will be held July 21. Details sent on the club reflector.
Welcome aboard to new SCCC member W6ZL! David joins us from Newport Beach, CA, and happens to be QSL manager for 3D2KM, A35KL and KF6RY.
more
The ARRL June VHF Contest was held June 9-11. June is typically has the best Sporadic-E propagation of the year. The new FT8 mode played prominently last year, and was used heavily again this year. MSK144 (meteor scatter) was a good place to be during times of no SpE and having worked all of the locals on ground wave. Known operations were N6GP/r roving through six to eight grids and running SSB and CW with some FT8 sprinkled in; and N6VHF running all modes on 50, 144, 432 and 1200 MHz (possibly 10 GHz for good measure!) as well as FM only on 902 MHz. And HOPEFULLY, everyone remembered to also tune the CW and SSB spectrum to pick up even more contacts!
A reminder, WRTC 2018 is July 14-15. Defending champions N6MJ and KL9A will be back. N6TR will pair up with N9RV on NA Team 6. David N6AN will be one of the referees. WRTC takes place during the IARU Championship (as a contest within a contest) and pits the world's currently most accomplished contesters against each other using similar stations and antennas, all within the same geographic region.
The ARRL DX CW contest results were released on June 13. Congratulations to W8QZA who operated W6QU in the Single Op QRP category and finished 8th nationwide. Congrats also to W6YA who placed 6th in the USA in the Single Op 20 meter category.
Field Day took place the final full weekend of June. Propagation wasn't the greatest (high A index) but it sounded like the groups were having a lot of fun. The Ventura County Amateur Radio Society (VCARS), The Simi Settlers Radio Club (SSRC) and members of the SCCC joined forces at The Ronald Regan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, operating as N6R. Other SCCCers headed out for stints with local radio clubs.
40 years ago, the SCCC did some serious Field Day contesting, hauling numerous tower trailers and big yagis up on mountaintops. That crew took home two #1 overalls and one second place finish. In 1980, they set an all time scoring record that stood for 14 years! More details and some pictures can be found on the N6NB web site.
The CQ WW DX Committee has made some rule changes that will be effective with the 2018 contests. You can read about them at cqww.com/blog/.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
A reminder, WRTC 2018 is July 14-15. Defending champions N6MJ and KL9A will be back. N6TR will pair up with N9RV on NA Team 6. David N6AN will be one of the referees. WRTC takes place during the IARU Championship (as a contest within a contest) and pits the world's currently most accomplished contesters against each other using similar stations and antennas, all within the same geographic region.
The ARRL DX CW contest results were released on June 13. Congratulations to W8QZA who operated W6QU in the Single Op QRP category and finished 8th nationwide. Congrats also to W6YA who placed 6th in the USA in the Single Op 20 meter category.
Field Day took place the final full weekend of June. Propagation wasn't the greatest (high A index) but it sounded like the groups were having a lot of fun. The Ventura County Amateur Radio Society (VCARS), The Simi Settlers Radio Club (SSRC) and members of the SCCC joined forces at The Ronald Regan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, operating as N6R. Other SCCCers headed out for stints with local radio clubs.
40 years ago, the SCCC did some serious Field Day contesting, hauling numerous tower trailers and big yagis up on mountaintops. That crew took home two #1 overalls and one second place finish. In 1980, they set an all time scoring record that stood for 14 years! More details and some pictures can be found on the N6NB web site.
The CQ WW DX Committee has made some rule changes that will be effective with the 2018 contests. You can read about them at cqww.com/blog/.
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
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Monthly News (SCCCORE)
June 2018
Who remembers the name of the club bulletin back in the 1980's? That's right, SCCCORE. Southern California Contest Club Operations, Results and Enlightenments. It was suggested by Jim, N6TJ. It and others were submitted and voted on by club members as we decided on a new name for the club bulletin. By popular vote, SCCCORE came out on top. The name debuted with the March-April, 1983 issue. I am considering changing this Monthly News column to SCCCORE, and of course continuing to publish it monthly. Let me know your thoughts.
I'd like to thank Jim, AF6O for his many years as SCCC webmaster. Jim did a great job putting the web site together and keeping fresh content up. I'd also like to thank him for coaching me as we worked on transitioning duties. I'm still learning about proper formatting, something Jim drove home during his coaching. It's harder than it looks, despite my years of authoring other web sites! And thank you, Jim, for continuing to host the web site.
WRTC 2018 is July 14-15. Defending champions N6MJ and KL9A (standing in the picture to the left) will be back. N6TR will pair up with N9RV on NA Team 6. David Hodge, N6AN will be one of the referees. WRTC takes place during the IARU Championship (as a contest within a contest) and pits the world's currently most accomplished contesters against each other using similar stations and antennas, all within the same geographic region.
more
Looks like everyone had a lot of fun in the recent CQ WPX CW contest! There were some big scores turned in by SCCCers, and several commented about how late 20m remained open to Europe on that Friday night.
SCCC #1 finished 10th in team scoring in the January, 2018 NAQP SSB contest. Team members KI6RRN, WN6K, N6WT, W6AFA and K6LA put up 313,891 points on the board. Our friends up north, NCCC #1 took top honors.
CQWW DX contest results are out.
In the SSB contest, W6TK, W6AFA and K6NA finished 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively in the 6th District all band, high power category. N6RV took the top spot in 6-land in the all band, low power catetory. WN6K was second. W6PH was tops in the all band, high power, assisted category. N6WIN and W6YI were 3rd and 4th respectively.
In the CW contest, SCCC placed 7th in the USA in the club category. Nice job, all! W6YA took 1st place, 6th District on 21 MHz. N6RV took 1st in the all band, low power category in 6-land. W6PH took 1st in all band, high power, assisted.
Full write-ups and line scores can be found on the CQWW web site.
The SCCC has won the Medium Club category in the 2018 ARRL January VHF contest! Five entrants put together 563K to take the gavel. PVRC was second (31 entrants, 406K points). N6NB won the Classic Rover category running 11 bands and visiting 10 grids. Wayne has now been contesting for more than 60 years! W6TE was second in the category. W6IT won the Southwestern Division Single Operator Low Power category. Meanwhile, KG6IYN set a new national record in the FM Only category! Congrats to all!
W6YI and team won the Multi-Op HP category of the 2017 ARRL November Sweepstakes Phone contest. W6AFA was the Southwestern Division winner Single Op, High Power. KK6ABZ won in the Southwestern Division QRP category. NX6T (op KK6NON) won the Southwestern Division Single Op Unlimited HP category.
In the 2017 ARRL 160 Meter Contest, K6NA placed fourth in the West Coast Region and tops in the SOHP category in the Southwestern Division.
The television sitcom LAST MAN STANDING featuring Tim Allen as Mike Baxter, KA0XTT (Tim's show call sign--his real call is KK6OTD) was cancelled by ABC in May, 2017. The show has been picked up by and will return on Fox this coming season. While Mike is not a contester on the show, nor is his show station shown all that much, any exposure on a national TV show is good exposure. And who hasn't strained to see if their QSL card is on his wall? (I'm guilty!) Tim and his TV crew were influenced by a crew member to get their amateur radio licenses. Does Tim get on the air and work us mere mortals? Of course he does!
Many of you have undoubtedly heard about the new Elecraft KPA1500 amplifier. The April, 2018 issue of CQ Magazine has a nice writeup on the amp written by W9KNI. Bob makes mention of things like small size, quiet operation, 32 watts drive for full 1.5 KW output, seamless intergration with the K3 transceiver, and a feature he really liked. The K3 can go automatically to a different preset power setting (typically 100 watts) when the amplifier is switched to standby.
Speaking of ham gear, Kenwood announced the new TS-890S at the Dayton Hamvention last month. The new transceiver sports a 7 inch TFT display, healthy receiver specs, and what appears to be a clean and easy to use front panel layout. Kenwood is billing this rig as "Best Performance for your DX life." This type of thing usually means great for contesting as well. Some dealers are now taking order reservations.
Yaesu also announced a new transceiver at Dayton, the FTDX101D SDR. And yes, it is an SDR radio with front panel knobs and buttons. Like the TS-890S, it has a large front panel display. The radio is designed with contesters in mind, harking back to the legendary FT-101 days. Look closely at the picture and you will see two front panel USB ports! Like the 890, some amateur outlets are already accepting order reservations.
According to an ARRL article, ICOM also debuted it's 7610 transceiver at Dayton. It too has a 7 inch display, something that is becoming more common in advanced transceivers. The 7610, like the FT-101D, is an SDR radio. And again, some outlets are taking order reservations. Both the 101D and the 7610 are not yet FCC Type Accepted and thus not available for sale in the USA as of yet.
From a CQ NEWS RELEASE:
The 2018 inductees to the CQ Contest Hall of Fame are:
Andy Blank, N2NT - Nominated by the Frankford Radio Club, Andy has been the director of the CQ World Wide 160-Meter DX Contest for the past decade. A world-class contester with wins stretching back to 1979, Andy has also competed in five Word Radiosport Team Championship (WRTC) competitions and was Director of Competition for WRTC-2014, held in Massa- chusetts. He is also a member of the advisory board of the World Wide Radio Operators' Foundation (WWROF).
Tom Wagner, N1MM - Nominated by both the Yankee Clipper Contest Club and the Northern California Contest Club, Tom is best known for his development of and ongoing upgrades to the N1MM Logger, which has become the world's most popular contest logging software. The program supports more than 240 different con- tests, multiple operating modes and integration with any number of transceivers and station accessories. Tom now leads a team of developers who are developing further en- hancements and were recognized with the YASME Excellence Award in 2015.
The CQ Contest Hall of Fame was established in 1986 to recognize those amateurs who have made major contributions to the art of radio contesting. This year's inductions bring the total number of members of the CQ Contest Hall of Fame to 71.
br> Should SCCC sponsor a contest plaque? I've floated this idea back in the 1980s as a Club officer, and I float it again now. I think we should. It's a way to give back to the contesting community. As a sponsor, we have a lot of options. We could sponsor an open plaque (that is, one needing a sponsor) in one of the major contests, domestic or world-wide. Or we could focus on a plaque awarded to a Southern California contester in a contest we choose. I've long thought we are missing in the California QSO Party, but I've had the same thought about some DX contests. We're better than this. Today, we don't sponsor any plaques at all as a club. Plaques cost about $80-$100 these days. AT $100, if 20 of us gave back $5 to the contesting community every year, we'd be in. I suspect most of us can afford five bux. Heck, skip one Starbucks or one time out at the fast food joint, and we're good. Some of us potentially could afford more. And believe you me, having myself donated in recent years to some things I care about (including amateur radio), putting in $10 or $20 (maybe more?) to a contest plaque (you wouldn't have read this far if you weren't interested in contesting) would go a long way. Sure, we get the SCCC name some recognition, but much more importantly, we reward a contester for a job well done. And encourage him or her to come back next year. And the year after that. A win-win in my humble opinion! Email me (webmaster) if you have thoughts on this subject and/or would like to contribute.
W6KY SK. SCCC sends its condolences to the family and friends of Art, W6KY. Art passed away last month. Services were held May 25 at Miramar National Cemetery.
Coming up:
June 9-11
The ARRL VHF Contest. With Sporadic-E season in full swing, 6 meters will likely be alive and kicking! FT8 on 50.313 will undoubtedly be the place to be, but CW, SSB, JT modes and even MSK144 should provide plenty of action. And don't forget the bands ABOVE 6 meters!
June 16-17
All Asian CW. Arguably, the west coast has a bit of an advantage versus the rest of the country in this one. And it's a lot of fun to work all of the Asian contesters on the other side of the Pacific!
June 16
Kids Day. Invite one or more kids to your QTH and show them how fun amateur radio is! If nothing else, get on the air and work the kids! They love it! Some will be motivated to get their own license and some day get a station of their own. It's these little things that got us all hooked!
June 23-24
ARRL Field Day. Many say "this is not a contest." But don't tell the SCCC that. Back in the day, the SCCC rolled out and put on full blown efforts, often winning their chosen category by a landslide. Whether you participate in a group that way, or just to have fun, do get out there with a local club and have a good time. Do some mentoring if you are joining a club effort where that club normally doesn't do any contesting. Most importantly, be a good ambassador of amateur radio!
Reminder. If you have station updates, pictures, your new ham web site, upcoming build or contest plans, etc, please send them to me for consideration in this space. Maybe you picked up a new rig, antenna, or accessory recently or would like to submit an equipment review. Let's get active, shall we?
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
I'd like to thank Jim, AF6O for his many years as SCCC webmaster. Jim did a great job putting the web site together and keeping fresh content up. I'd also like to thank him for coaching me as we worked on transitioning duties. I'm still learning about proper formatting, something Jim drove home during his coaching. It's harder than it looks, despite my years of authoring other web sites! And thank you, Jim, for continuing to host the web site.
WRTC 2018 is July 14-15. Defending champions N6MJ and KL9A (standing in the picture to the left) will be back. N6TR will pair up with N9RV on NA Team 6. David Hodge, N6AN will be one of the referees. WRTC takes place during the IARU Championship (as a contest within a contest) and pits the world's currently most accomplished contesters against each other using similar stations and antennas, all within the same geographic region.
more
Looks like everyone had a lot of fun in the recent CQ WPX CW contest! There were some big scores turned in by SCCCers, and several commented about how late 20m remained open to Europe on that Friday night.
SCCC #1 finished 10th in team scoring in the January, 2018 NAQP SSB contest. Team members KI6RRN, WN6K, N6WT, W6AFA and K6LA put up 313,891 points on the board. Our friends up north, NCCC #1 took top honors.
CQWW DX contest results are out.
In the SSB contest, W6TK, W6AFA and K6NA finished 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively in the 6th District all band, high power category. N6RV took the top spot in 6-land in the all band, low power catetory. WN6K was second. W6PH was tops in the all band, high power, assisted category. N6WIN and W6YI were 3rd and 4th respectively.
In the CW contest, SCCC placed 7th in the USA in the club category. Nice job, all! W6YA took 1st place, 6th District on 21 MHz. N6RV took 1st in the all band, low power category in 6-land. W6PH took 1st in all band, high power, assisted.
Full write-ups and line scores can be found on the CQWW web site.
The SCCC has won the Medium Club category in the 2018 ARRL January VHF contest! Five entrants put together 563K to take the gavel. PVRC was second (31 entrants, 406K points). N6NB won the Classic Rover category running 11 bands and visiting 10 grids. Wayne has now been contesting for more than 60 years! W6TE was second in the category. W6IT won the Southwestern Division Single Operator Low Power category. Meanwhile, KG6IYN set a new national record in the FM Only category! Congrats to all!
W6YI and team won the Multi-Op HP category of the 2017 ARRL November Sweepstakes Phone contest. W6AFA was the Southwestern Division winner Single Op, High Power. KK6ABZ won in the Southwestern Division QRP category. NX6T (op KK6NON) won the Southwestern Division Single Op Unlimited HP category.
In the 2017 ARRL 160 Meter Contest, K6NA placed fourth in the West Coast Region and tops in the SOHP category in the Southwestern Division.
The television sitcom LAST MAN STANDING featuring Tim Allen as Mike Baxter, KA0XTT (Tim's show call sign--his real call is KK6OTD) was cancelled by ABC in May, 2017. The show has been picked up by and will return on Fox this coming season. While Mike is not a contester on the show, nor is his show station shown all that much, any exposure on a national TV show is good exposure. And who hasn't strained to see if their QSL card is on his wall? (I'm guilty!) Tim and his TV crew were influenced by a crew member to get their amateur radio licenses. Does Tim get on the air and work us mere mortals? Of course he does!
Many of you have undoubtedly heard about the new Elecraft KPA1500 amplifier. The April, 2018 issue of CQ Magazine has a nice writeup on the amp written by W9KNI. Bob makes mention of things like small size, quiet operation, 32 watts drive for full 1.5 KW output, seamless intergration with the K3 transceiver, and a feature he really liked. The K3 can go automatically to a different preset power setting (typically 100 watts) when the amplifier is switched to standby.
Speaking of ham gear, Kenwood announced the new TS-890S at the Dayton Hamvention last month. The new transceiver sports a 7 inch TFT display, healthy receiver specs, and what appears to be a clean and easy to use front panel layout. Kenwood is billing this rig as "Best Performance for your DX life." This type of thing usually means great for contesting as well. Some dealers are now taking order reservations.
Yaesu also announced a new transceiver at Dayton, the FTDX101D SDR. And yes, it is an SDR radio with front panel knobs and buttons. Like the TS-890S, it has a large front panel display. The radio is designed with contesters in mind, harking back to the legendary FT-101 days. Look closely at the picture and you will see two front panel USB ports! Like the 890, some amateur outlets are already accepting order reservations.
According to an ARRL article, ICOM also debuted it's 7610 transceiver at Dayton. It too has a 7 inch display, something that is becoming more common in advanced transceivers. The 7610, like the FT-101D, is an SDR radio. And again, some outlets are taking order reservations. Both the 101D and the 7610 are not yet FCC Type Accepted and thus not available for sale in the USA as of yet.
From a CQ NEWS RELEASE:
The 2018 inductees to the CQ Contest Hall of Fame are:
Andy Blank, N2NT - Nominated by the Frankford Radio Club, Andy has been the director of the CQ World Wide 160-Meter DX Contest for the past decade. A world-class contester with wins stretching back to 1979, Andy has also competed in five Word Radiosport Team Championship (WRTC) competitions and was Director of Competition for WRTC-2014, held in Massa- chusetts. He is also a member of the advisory board of the World Wide Radio Operators' Foundation (WWROF).
Tom Wagner, N1MM - Nominated by both the Yankee Clipper Contest Club and the Northern California Contest Club, Tom is best known for his development of and ongoing upgrades to the N1MM Logger, which has become the world's most popular contest logging software. The program supports more than 240 different con- tests, multiple operating modes and integration with any number of transceivers and station accessories. Tom now leads a team of developers who are developing further en- hancements and were recognized with the YASME Excellence Award in 2015.
The CQ Contest Hall of Fame was established in 1986 to recognize those amateurs who have made major contributions to the art of radio contesting. This year's inductions bring the total number of members of the CQ Contest Hall of Fame to 71.
br> Should SCCC sponsor a contest plaque? I've floated this idea back in the 1980s as a Club officer, and I float it again now. I think we should. It's a way to give back to the contesting community. As a sponsor, we have a lot of options. We could sponsor an open plaque (that is, one needing a sponsor) in one of the major contests, domestic or world-wide. Or we could focus on a plaque awarded to a Southern California contester in a contest we choose. I've long thought we are missing in the California QSO Party, but I've had the same thought about some DX contests. We're better than this. Today, we don't sponsor any plaques at all as a club. Plaques cost about $80-$100 these days. AT $100, if 20 of us gave back $5 to the contesting community every year, we'd be in. I suspect most of us can afford five bux. Heck, skip one Starbucks or one time out at the fast food joint, and we're good. Some of us potentially could afford more. And believe you me, having myself donated in recent years to some things I care about (including amateur radio), putting in $10 or $20 (maybe more?) to a contest plaque (you wouldn't have read this far if you weren't interested in contesting) would go a long way. Sure, we get the SCCC name some recognition, but much more importantly, we reward a contester for a job well done. And encourage him or her to come back next year. And the year after that. A win-win in my humble opinion! Email me (webmaster) if you have thoughts on this subject and/or would like to contribute.
W6KY SK. SCCC sends its condolences to the family and friends of Art, W6KY. Art passed away last month. Services were held May 25 at Miramar National Cemetery.
Coming up:
June 9-11
The ARRL VHF Contest. With Sporadic-E season in full swing, 6 meters will likely be alive and kicking! FT8 on 50.313 will undoubtedly be the place to be, but CW, SSB, JT modes and even MSK144 should provide plenty of action. And don't forget the bands ABOVE 6 meters!
June 16-17
All Asian CW. Arguably, the west coast has a bit of an advantage versus the rest of the country in this one. And it's a lot of fun to work all of the Asian contesters on the other side of the Pacific!
June 16
Kids Day. Invite one or more kids to your QTH and show them how fun amateur radio is! If nothing else, get on the air and work the kids! They love it! Some will be motivated to get their own license and some day get a station of their own. It's these little things that got us all hooked!
June 23-24
ARRL Field Day. Many say "this is not a contest." But don't tell the SCCC that. Back in the day, the SCCC rolled out and put on full blown efforts, often winning their chosen category by a landslide. Whether you participate in a group that way, or just to have fun, do get out there with a local club and have a good time. Do some mentoring if you are joining a club effort where that club normally doesn't do any contesting. Most importantly, be a good ambassador of amateur radio!
Reminder. If you have station updates, pictures, your new ham web site, upcoming build or contest plans, etc, please send them to me for consideration in this space. Maybe you picked up a new rig, antenna, or accessory recently or would like to submit an equipment review. Let's get active, shall we?
73 for now,
--Dennis NE6I
less
Monthly News
May 2018
NEW this month...
I will be looking to publish some Monthly News and blurbs in this space going forward. If you have anything you would like to share, please send to the webmaster. All contributions encouraged! Pics, thoughts, news, what you are doing with your station this season, observations, any & all are welcome!
Congratulations go out to some SCCCers in the 2017 ARRL Sweepstakes CW!
K6LA was a Division winner in the Single Operator, High Power category.
KI6RRN placed 7th and was a Division winner in the Single Operator, Low Power category.
W6YI & team took top honors overall in the MultiOp, Single Transmitter, High Power category!
Shown here, left to right, N6KI, N6WIN and K6AM at the W6YI MSHP station.
more
And in the the 2017 ARRL Sweepstakes Phone contest...
W6AFA was the Division winner in Single Operator, High Power.
KK6ABZ was the Division winner in Single Operator, QRP.
NX6T operated by KK6NON was the Division winner in Single Operator, Unlimited, High Power.
W6YI, and team took top honors here too in the MultiOp, Single Transmitter, High Power category. It is their fourth win in a row in this category!
All four of these plaques sponsored by Icom America. Congrats to the winners and a huge thank you to Icom America!
Coming up:
May 26-27
The CQWW WPX CW Contest. This one is super fun! Work the world and work the USA too! Every new prefix is a multiplier! The rate remains high throughout!
June 9-11
The 2018 ARRL June VHF Contest. Look out! If conditions are even remotely decent, some big scores are likely to appear! FT8 has taken the VHF world by storm! But don't rule out CW, SSB and even the JT modes. Tons of fun! Never tried VHF? Surely your current rig has 6 meters. No 6m antenna? Throw up a dipole and try FT8 using WSJT-X software. It doesn't have to be up in the air very high. Try it. You will be hooked!
June 16
Kids Day. Invite one or more kids to your QTH and show them how fun amateur radio is! If nothing else, get on the air and work the kids! They love it! Some will be motivated to get their own license and some day get a station of their own. It's these little things that got us all hooked!
And a parting shot...
If you enjoy VHF/UHF contesting, DXing or just making contacts on the bands 50 MHz and above, you might like to check out The Cali VHF UHF Page. This chat page allows you to keep track on what others in California are seeing and doing, and arrange contacts on the upper bands. Click on the Register button to allow for posting there. No spam, no junk, just VHF enthusiasts.
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I will be looking to publish some Monthly News and blurbs in this space going forward. If you have anything you would like to share, please send to the webmaster. All contributions encouraged! Pics, thoughts, news, what you are doing with your station this season, observations, any & all are welcome!
Congratulations go out to some SCCCers in the 2017 ARRL Sweepstakes CW!
K6LA was a Division winner in the Single Operator, High Power category.
KI6RRN placed 7th and was a Division winner in the Single Operator, Low Power category.
W6YI & team took top honors overall in the MultiOp, Single Transmitter, High Power category!
Shown here, left to right, N6KI, N6WIN and K6AM at the W6YI MSHP station.
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And in the the 2017 ARRL Sweepstakes Phone contest...
W6AFA was the Division winner in Single Operator, High Power.
KK6ABZ was the Division winner in Single Operator, QRP.
NX6T operated by KK6NON was the Division winner in Single Operator, Unlimited, High Power.
W6YI, and team took top honors here too in the MultiOp, Single Transmitter, High Power category. It is their fourth win in a row in this category!
All four of these plaques sponsored by Icom America. Congrats to the winners and a huge thank you to Icom America!
Coming up:
May 26-27
The CQWW WPX CW Contest. This one is super fun! Work the world and work the USA too! Every new prefix is a multiplier! The rate remains high throughout!
June 9-11
The 2018 ARRL June VHF Contest. Look out! If conditions are even remotely decent, some big scores are likely to appear! FT8 has taken the VHF world by storm! But don't rule out CW, SSB and even the JT modes. Tons of fun! Never tried VHF? Surely your current rig has 6 meters. No 6m antenna? Throw up a dipole and try FT8 using WSJT-X software. It doesn't have to be up in the air very high. Try it. You will be hooked!
June 16
Kids Day. Invite one or more kids to your QTH and show them how fun amateur radio is! If nothing else, get on the air and work the kids! They love it! Some will be motivated to get their own license and some day get a station of their own. It's these little things that got us all hooked!
And a parting shot...
If you enjoy VHF/UHF contesting, DXing or just making contacts on the bands 50 MHz and above, you might like to check out The Cali VHF UHF Page. This chat page allows you to keep track on what others in California are seeing and doing, and arrange contacts on the upper bands. Click on the Register button to allow for posting there. No spam, no junk, just VHF enthusiasts.
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