WQ6X Muses over the Many Methods for Meticulous Manipulation

While the WQ6X Contest BLOG is largely about the contest operations themselves, other Blog entries document the equipment behind the operations, as well as unique operating procedures to leverage different devices towards working in unison.

Having an array of 7-audio filters (front-ended by a Radio Shaft 16-channel stereo equalizer) is
an example of this.  The Stereo-audio concepts I have so thoroughly documented in these Blogs,
are possible thanks to the pair of Old-school, Analog, Autek QF-1A dual-filter units front-ending the stereo audio chain.

I asked Ashley @A-I to pretty up the above picture and she recommended something like this.

It seems that Ashley has a bit of an aesthetic flair to draw from.

I then asked her to put the two units closer together - she suggested this:

On the antenna side of things, not only has the 10m Long John yagi been found to tune
easily as a shortened-yagi on 15 meters, for 20 meters it seems to work as a rotatable dipole. 
On 40-meters, in many situations the configuration seems to be an excellent low-noise RX antenna
(a Beverage Yagi?).

In the middle of a recent slow-dragging radiosport contest, while waiting for the bands to recover
from some NASTY Space-WX, I rigged a coax switch for the Long John Yagi:

• LEFT:  The COAX-2 connector on the MFJ-993B IntelliTuner
• RIGHT: The RX-ANT jack on back of the FT-2000

Since then, the Long John has been "Vindicated" for BOTH receiving and transmitting purposes.

Unfortunately, the lower band neighborhood vicinity noise level seems to have increased in recent years.  The next "experiment" will be to re-insert a languishing MFJ-1026 noise canceler in the receive antenna line, in an attempt to phase-out the noise BEFORE it gets into the FT-2000 transceiver.

In preparation for upcoming radiosport events, I always check the contest website(s) for rule
changes, as well as the score(s) from previous years, to create an estimation of how to run this iteration of the upcoming contest.

It is really easy to come to the wrong conclusion(s) regarding signal reception in a given area.

There are several offbeat (altho useful) things that can be done to improve our operating experience:

• Beacon Tracking - Tracking the NCDXF and Russian military beacons can assist us towards getting a better handle on propagation issues.
• The Reverse Beacon Network (RBN) is an excellent way to determine whether in fact our signals are being heard around the globe.  ([CLICK HERE] to read my take on it back in 2o22.)

Bottom-line is that when I am not running a radiosport contest weekend, I am probably trying out new techniques to eek that last 5% of operating performance improvement to make the next major contest GiG an even better success.

What about YOU?

Do YOU experiment with novel techniques?