Wednesday, April 26, 2023

What Do We Say about Weekend 3?












The 3rd weekend in April is a weekend FULL of small/short (but nevertheless significant)
radiosport events.  Beginning Friday evening, I set up the array of contest logfiles for 7
contests, altho only 5 events ended up with a logfile submission.

While setting up the logfiles and testing the different antenna configurations, I found time to
watch the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch at 11:48pm (PDT) from Vandenburg base in Southern California. 
I used to watch all the rocket launches when I was a kid, so this takes me back to those excited feelings once again.

Of the 7 available radiosport GiGs, the "no shows" were of course the Holyland event (Jerusalem is one of the most difficult-to-reach QTH's from N. California) and the WAPC (Worked All Provinces of China) - while I saw a handful of internet spots on the bandmap, they were almost always spotted by other Chinese stations, or heard only in Europe - neither of which does us any good.  With the above two GiGs a non-issue, that left 3 poorly attended QSO parties, a poorly participated (outside of Europe) YUDX contest, and of course, the weekend favorite: the CQMM Cw Contest.

Space-WX throughout the weekend was reasonably cooperative with an SFI between 150 and 170.  With a K-Index, while there were no major ionospheric disruptions, a low-to-medium ionospheric background noise made 1st-time 100%-copy nearly impossible.

Slow contest weekends allow time for testing reconfigured audio and control cabling for the portable setup in Concord.  With so many different audio devices (whether switched inline or not), chasing down (and eliminating) ground loops is always a monumental task.  Recent experimentation resulted in a pair of blog updates to the Stereo-Cw / Stereo-Ssb topics (an update for Stereo-RTTY is next).

In addition to proper stereo-filtering at the Concord location, it seems like there is always some sort
of RFI audio disruption on 15 & 40 meters when transmitting into the [ladder-line fed] 8JK Cobra array.  In years passed, the RFI invasion only occurred on 20-meters, however it was often strong enough to overload the RigExpert PLUS device and sometimes even resulted in a Windoze-7
"Blue Screen"

When it was ALL over, it would seem that 100 QSOs made it into the WQ6X CQMM LoG.

DiD YOU work the CQMM Contest?

Is WQ6X in YOUR LoG?


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