I’ll start this month with a short tribute to Ron, G0WGP. Ron was a great help to me in my early days with the MSARS. He was instrumental in encouraging me to learn from himself, Louis G5RV, and the many others who rapidly built up my knowledge base following my gaining my full licence. Ron’s tales of his time in the Shetland Isle’s during the war still remain with me. Thanks, Ron, RIP.
Last month I indicated that I would elaborate on 'slot chasing'. This is trying to work as many as possible. Each DXCC can be worked on each band and in three modes on each band - phone, CW and data. New starters usually aim to work 100 DXCCs (countries) followed by trying to do that on each band or on each mode. For example, working a MSARS station on say, 10m, 12m, 15m, and 20m equals 4 slots. Doing this on both phone and CW is 8 slots, and so on. There are hundreds of combinations so go on - have a try!
Just to prove that I’m wrong I decided to work this year’s IARU contest, on 15m CW only. This interesting contest has a mix of 'targets' to aim for. This year there were contest stations located in Italy all 'on a level playing field' with the same call format, such as I41A through to I49Z. I only managed 19 of these. In addition, everyone else reports their ITU zone number (UK is in 27). I managed 18 of these, and just to add to this, each DXCC had an HQ station with its abbreviation as its report (UK was RSGB). I managed 11 of these. Not too bad as conditions were terrible at the time, with dreadful QSB and local lightning storms to add to the mayhem!
Just as the month was getting going 'IT' arrived, the Rockall QSL card, an early birthday card!
Last month I mentioned the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and its usual summer activation. Well, on the 26th up they popped! From nothing to a multi-band multi-operator station. I managed an SSB contact on 17m for another new one for the year.
At the end of the month, it was the IOTA islands contest, so I had a go, but with only moderate success this time. Luckily these included several Chinese islands and a handful of North American ones that I needed.
As Autumn is just around the corner, I thought it a good time to try and set up one of these new data modes ready for the darker evenings. Having worked many stations some years back on PSK31, I thought it would be easy. However, the advances in both hardware and software have made it all 'new' to me. Fortunately my K3 is one of the favourite radios for datamodes so the instruction manuals were easy to follow. The software is downloadable from the internet, no more disks to buy!
It took over a week to get a signal out of my system, mostly because of Chemo’ induced finger trouble. When I finally succeeded, I had a surprise when I set up a session and managed to work Crawley!
Oh, and Kuwait, plus 15 or so DXCCs in one half hour.
More next month.
Good DXing
Chris, G4ZCS
