The Russians are coming!

Has anyone else noticed the tremendous amount of Russian stations on 40 meters lately in the evenings? Hearing and working Russian stations in the past was never particularly unusual from where I live in NC, especially European Russians. But the past week or so they seem to be booming in like never before. In fact, I've been surprised at just how many of them are some of the strongest signals on the cw portion of the band.

I've tried working many of them QRP, with some success. The one thing that I've noticed whenever I listen to them work other stations is that they, as a whole, seem to pass out more realistic signal reports. Rarely do you hear the obligatory 5NN. Kind of refreshing and far more useful if you're trying to judge how effectively you're getting out. I know 5NN is easy, but I appreciate when someone gives a real report nowadays.

Also, they seem to prefer a "full" exchange, RST, QTH, and name, rather than RST and "TU". No complaints on this end, but wonder why that is? I guess it could just be coincidence, but of the couple dozen or so that I've either heard or worked in the past couple of days, I've noticed this pattern. Sure, it slows things down a bit, but it's also a little more personal.

Very glad that 40 seems to be doing well on that path.

I've also spent some time trying to figure out the DSP on my K2. When I bought it, the fellow who sold it to me said that he'd built the DSP module but never was able to make it work. Actually, when he advertised the radio he didn't list the DSP module at all and later, after I'd won the auction, he tossed it in. But he never elaborated on why he couldn't get it to work. Not long after I'd had it, I put the module in and it seemed to be ok to me. The radio recognized it and all the adjustments seemed to have an effect on received signals. But as time passed I found the regular filters sufficient and never resorted to using it.

But a posting on the Elecraft reflector rekindled my interest and I dug out the notes, searched through some more postings and began tinkering with it some more. I'm not crazy about the "watery" sound that it produces - I find that really distracting and keep thinking that something is wrong with my radio - but after doing some A/B comparisons on some weak signals, I'm starting to develop an appreciation for it. There's no doubt that it can help in some circumstances and I've been able to copy some signals using the DSP that I don't believe I could have otherwise. I think I'm slowly getting used to the watery sound too.

Evidently, however, I've managed to muck something up because whenever I turn on the radio now, it starts up with DSP enabled and in a rather strong setting to boot. It's not a big deal to turn it off, just a couple of clicks, but I must've done something to cause this and it's kind of annoying. I need to see if there's some way that I've managed to save that configuration to EEPROM, more than likely it's something along those lines.

One thing that I've read on the reflector that I'll wholeheartedly agree with is how difficult it is to resist constantly fiddling with the beta and decay settings. The end result is that my filters end up being out of sequence with how I expect them to operate :) But I'm glad that I revisited it and I'm not afraid to use it now when I feel the need.

Too much time on my hands

My job often takes me to different parts of the country. I do a lot of traveling by car. It usually isn't very long into a trip when my mind starts to wonder towards ham radio. That was the case the other day as I made my way home from Indiana.

I started thinking about my contesting efforts. I've never really taken a serious approach to contesting, at least not in the true sense of trying to rack up a decent score. I enjoy them for what they are and I plan to keep on participating, but I've generally used them for purposes other than trying to reach a high score. For instance, I'll try and nab new countries, which means that I'm often calling a single station for quite a while - sometimes a really long time depending on the pileup. Or I'll try and work all 50 states, paying more attention to prefixes and spots than working as many stations as I can. My approach generally depends on the contest, of course.

But as I drove, I began to wonder, if a person focused solely on racking up points, how good of a score can a 100 watt (or less) station achieve that uses search and pounce exclusively and also tries to keep multipliers in mind? I've tried to "run" before, and right now I will admit, I'm not very good at it. That's something I need to work on, but given my modest antennas and my power output, how realistic is it that I should even try to "run"? Perhaps later on in the longer contests it's reasonable to expect that I might be able to enjoy a couple of runs, but by and large I'm going to have to use search and pounce.

So the question popped into my mind, are really high scores possible using only search and pounce with modest equipment? And, of course, I'm talking about using only one radio. Are there any statistical evaluations of that? Has anyone compiled any tables comparing the two approaches? I'd be really curious to see some scores in major contests of folks who only use search and pounce exclusively.

I would have to think that operators who compete in the big contests using QRP have to use search and pounce very effectively unless they have an antenna farm that boggles the imagination. And I've seen some awfully good scores posted by some of the QRP ops.

Now, I'm sure if I spent more BIC (butt in chair) time, and tried to hone my own search and pounce skills, I could improve my scores without much difficulty - and I intend to do that. I know there's no 'smoking gun' or single piece of equipment that's going to substitute for actually getting in there and making QSO's. But I know that there have to be times where one can use search and pounce to their advantage. Such as late at night, when you often hear the big gun stations rattling off endless strings of CQ's, with few, if any, replies. It's those times where a person using search and pounce can still accumulate a respectable amount of points.

Anyone have any insight into this?

I can't HEEEEAAARRRR you!!

I can't hear you!!! One of the great lines delivered by Sgt. Carter on Gomer Pyle. Unfortunately, since reassembling my hex beam antenna, it seems to be the phrase I'm yelling most often at the spotting screen. Those of you who follow my blog probably know that my hex suffered some damage during a rather unusually wet snow fall we had here in North Carolina back in February. You can view some of the damage that happened in one of my earlier postings. However, it looked much worse than it was. The hex rebounded nicely and only one of the spreaders was damaged and had to be repaired. Otherwise, when I put it back together, it was just like putting it together for the first time, everything went together fine.

But there's something different...or so it seems. Darn thing is noisy as heck lately. It's as if my noise level has jumped several S-units. And what I was alluding to by borrowing Sgt. Carter's line was, there are many stations that I feel that I SHOULD be hearing, or that are reported as "599 in NC" on spots that I'm either barely able to hear on the hex, or don't hear at all. Worse, when I switch over to the vertical, sometimes they become a better copy. And, on the dipole, they're often easy copy. Both of those antennas don't have the same noise level either, even the vertical, which surprises me. I don't remember that being the case at all before.

I don't know if something got fouled up in the centerpole or what? It seems to be sealed up tight. All the connections where the individual wires tie into the centerpole seem unaffected from the mishap, no other visible problems. I've swapped out coax, retightened and examined connections and I can't find anything wrong.

I guess my next step is to contact the manufacturer and see what he might have to say. If anyone who reads this has any experience with hex beams, I'd sure welcome any suggestions.

73

Dazed and confused

Both of the CQ WPX contests give me fits, CW and SSB. Why? I get so confused about what I need to be doing.

Do I try and catch the contest spirit of sheer numbers and work as many stations as I possibly can? Do I try and work as many DX stations as I can at the expense of US and Canadian stations? Do I try and search out countries that I need to confirm? Do I try and find that elusive station in South Carolina that will complete my WAS via LOTW?

If I was able to 'run' then it wouldn't matter, it would mostly be decided for me. But when you operate search and pounce exclusively, then it becomes a matter of choice. How much time do you spend trying to call a station before giving up and moving on? A number of times I was about to move on when I finally got through. But did I spend too much time calling that one station? Should I have been trying to work others and come back later?

I seem to be overwhelmed when you're able to work just about anyone from anywhere.

In the end, however, it was mostly a game of WHO could I actually work when the contest started. Running low power, I didn't get through often, and when I did, I felt that I ended up causing more problems on the other end with repeats. I do appreciate everyone who stuck with me and dug out my call or my serial number, I know it wasn't easy.

The second day was better after the herd had thinned out some. I added a couple of new countries overall, plus several that I'd only worked before on CW.