Alea jacta est : OJ0 here we come

From 30/06/2013 till 7/07/2013 Market Reef will be activated by this quartet : ON8VP, ON6QO, ON5JT and myself.
As we are all CW operators, this will be our primary mode.

Shopping at MFJ : customer king ?!

I know, the economic situation isn't good.
I know : customer is king at this moment.
Every company tries to get the most out of the customer... The more he buys, the better.

However,there are some exceptions who let you buy, but don't let you pay. Yes, I have the right example :
MFJ Enterprises, Mississippi, USA, probably the only company in the world that doesn't want the customer to let pay an order.

 I explain : since a few months I'm looking around to achieve a MFJ-998RT remote high power automatic tuner. There is only one problem : when looking at the comments on eham.net, several hams have had troubles with this box. I've had contacts with some of these guys and it seems that there is a problem with the pic and/or the resistance to static around the pic circuit. This seems a real problem with a series of boxes that were distributed by European dealers. There is also a small piece of text in the QST-magazine review indicating that there has been a workaround to solve these known problems

. So, this made me decide to order directly in the USA. Where can you buy an MFJ box : at MFJ of course... Yes, until you have to pay. On the site there are icons of Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, but if you order, the following message appears : payment only via wired transfer. 
 Ok, you pay at your home bank, for credit to Regions Bank in the USA via Bank of America, for credit to bank 3 in Mississippi, for account of MFJ with your order number. 
Simple, until you arrive at the bank to perform the payment. Swift number 1+2, aba number 1+2, what is the account number of bank 3 sir ? Uhhhh ? .... 

Mail to mfj (ok, there is possitive news : they give an answer on a question quickly): sorry sir, we do not accept international orders via credit card and the given bank data must be sufficient. Ok, there you are. Back to the bank. I didn't tell that I work in a bank, so this step is easy for me... 

Final solution : cancel the order. 
No revival of the economic crisis at MFJ, they don't want customers ! This afternoon I entered the same order at DX-engineering, the payment is done via Mastercard and the box is allready sent to the transport company. 

Happy 40th anniversary MFJ !

They have read my blog !

For all hams who are addicted to the dxcluster, who just take over the indicated info and start calling the dx station : good news !

NH8S is now indicated as Swains Island and no more as American Samoa.

So, if you have allready worked American Samoa, but you still miss Swains Island, turn on the machine and work this station !

Thank you dxsummit.fi for helping us to turn the beam into the right direction.

Swains in Samoa

Back in town.
Three weeks ago I was active in the 80 miles marching event organised by the Belgian army, remembering all those who died during WW I while defending our freedom.   Just great to have 4 days of free time close with nature, history and other walkers and fight against your own limits (the last miles were similar with a WW contest after 40 hours).
This weekend we spend some more time in the same region, visiting the daily last post event with our children. Although this event repeats every day since 1928, it quite impressive to be there and see how many people are present too.

Yesterday afternoon, time to take a quick shack-visit.  Dxsummit was showing American Samoa all the time on my gsm, and I miss this DXCC.
Turned the antennas to 10 degrees and worked NH8S after a few calls... very weak signal and problems with my OMpower ampli.  I couldn't get more than 1 KW output and the drain current was going into red.  I tuned, retuned, changed band, went back, etc... nothing helped. Until I had the idea to check to power lines... damn ! A phase was not turned on.  I use a power connector with a small control lamp, but with the sun shining I hadn't seen it wasn't turned on.
Problem solved.
Second disappointment : NH8S is not American Samoa but Swains Island.  So not a new one for me.... and also in another direction.  This explained also the weak signal, I was beaming to a wrong direction.
Another disadvantage of having too much faith in the dx cluster.

I wasn't that active on the air the last weeks due to all other activities and I finally took the time to clear my big QSL backlog.  All QSL cards are now written/answered and will leave next Friday.

My RTTY project is now in standby mode : I'm waiting to see the possibilities of the new Yaesu FT3000DX in accordance to RTTY (I seems that it contains an encoder/decoder as an option, but I couldn't find more info on the net).  If this isn't ok, I go for the Icom7600 as planned.
I hope that this can be terminated before the WW RTTY contest.

Oh yes, on 15m DXCC 200 has been achieved thanks to KH6.
Next nearby achievement is on 17m where the counter shows 93...

Contest categories

I see many ongoing discussions on the net that handle about the subcategories in contests.
In my opinion - of course I've also an opinion on this item -, keep it as simple as possible and make a difference in human behaviour in stead of splitting up technical situations.
There is a big difference between single operator and multi operator.  Especially after several hours of contesting, a replacement by another operator is a big advantage.
So keep it simple : SO, M/S, M2 (needed ?),  MM.  
Although this simplicity the IARU contest doesn't comply with this; no they find that an assisted single operator equals a multi-single station.  Uhhh ???  I've not enough brains to find the logic on it...

On the technical categories, I agree with QRP (10W), low power (why not <200W with all the new transceivers giving 200W output) and high power - no, correction,  better said : higher power.
And here the discussion starts with the question what is the limit high power : 1KW, 1.5KW, 5KW, 10KW ?  Does it make sense to categorize high power ?  I see many US stations crying that the limit is 1,5KW. 
Of course, the FCC doesn't allow higher power.  If FCC agrees with 2KW, are we going to change the opinion and go to 2KW ?   And what with countries that are limited to 500W ?

I see many of these guys thinking : the high power limit is what I can handle in my station/country.  And as many big contests are controlled by US hams, this means 1500 W.
On the other side, the same guys are promoting stacked yagis and multi-tower setups.  
Not that difficult if you have 100 acres in the middle of nowhere.  Where I live, I can place many towers and stacked yagis too, but my neighbours wouldn't appreciate it, so no possibility.

Keep it simple : 10W, 200W and an open category.
Open category : no power restrictions, no antenna restrictions, SO2R allowed, assistance allowed.  But : one operator and only one signal in the air.



Big respect for the teams that can handle 10KW in an M/M environment, foresee enough electricity, avoid antenna and coax burnings in the complete chain, and live in peace with the neighbours when it comes to EMI problems...





 

Alternative for WAE

After two weeks of handling with the dark side of live (hospitals, funeral, etc.) I've found back the way to the shack.
Last week I could only make some contacts within the EU HF champ. but I can still remember R3/EA8CAC.  This station had such a 9+++++ signal that my tx was pointing at the far end of the needle.  Never seen such a signal.   Even with a dummyload, I could hear it.

Yesterday I found an alternative for those who do not like exchanging QTC's...  :  the WAE WARC contest, category SO HP mixed mode - no QTC.
I was active on 12m CW beaming JA and later in the afternoon on 17m ssb beaming NA.  I made about 200 QSOs in a contest-like style with 13 new DXCC bandslots and without one QTC-exchange.
Some stations were telling that I was the only strong signal on the band.  Not that difficult, all the other stations were in the contest, hi.

Especially 12m had a nice opening to Asia.  I tried to analyse it afterwards on reverse beacon, but only the non-warc bands are taken into account.  So a small excel sheet helps also.  JE1SGH reported a relative stable signal during the one hour activity.

This week some DX stations were very active.  I could increase the dxcc counter to 287 with PJ5 on air.  CY9M confirmed 3 bands, but 20m is missing.  Apparently they've had some troubles with the log and the PC clock.  I've to resend my 20m QSO's to get it confirmed.

D64K is not for me this time.  I worked D68C on every band except on 80/160m.  Until now D64K wasn't active on the low bands...

Although my absence in the shack during the first half of the year, my degree of activity is going up faster than expected.  I've now >3000 qso's in the log during the last weeks and this makes 2012 allready a good year comparing to the past.  

With both CQWW contests to come, 2012 will end in a top-3 position  together with 2006 and 2007.

I seems that there will be a small club expedition next year in July.  Market Reef will probably be the target...

Summer fun and other stuff

Today I had my first test with the new equipment and a real expedition on air : CY9M.

How stupid can you be : I was convinced that this had something to do with Chile, or even better, the CE base on Antartica.  So this morning I was beaming SA and  I heard him calling but he was weak.... of course he was almost at the null-point of my beam...  This afternoon I tried again, this time with the laptop in the shack and N1MM running.   N1MM informed me that the good location was the other way up to Canada.  I turned the antenna, tuned to full power and the first call was a good one.  Indeed Saint-Paul Isl. is near to Canada and not an antartic base....   Stupid boy !  Thank you N1MM...  DXCC 285 is in the log.

A little remark : the lids + police heard on the band coming from Europe and Russia was incredible.  The poor operator was able to work only 1 QSO/minute and this also resulted in a cluster post : poor op, only 1 qso/minute...

This afternoon I continued to play in the shack.  Antennas to JA on 18 mhz and calling CQ with N1MM.
60  Japanese stations, some DU & HL and a few European stations were put in the log.  I've learned my lesson since Monday evening...

On Monday evening, we had only one laptop in the house and the XYL - also a licensed operator but not that interested anymore - wanted to surf on the internet.  So I went to the shack to do some holiday-style QSO'ing to the States.  With my qsl cards near to me, the plan was to make some contacts directly filling in the card.  No paper log, no pc.

Oh my God ! After two contacts a US station put me in the cluster and I had a pile-up.  I had just enough time to fill in the call, give 599 and take another card.  I worked 100 stations on this 'holiday'-style, but I'll never do it again without PC.  Sorry for all mistakes in the CW... even a 73 was like 74 and a few times I've sent OT1R instead of OT1A... too busy with writing my QSL cards...

This evening I was programming in VB in order to automate the process of the QSO flow.  Now I take the QSO's from N1MM and put them into my own logging program, send it to lotw and upload it to clublog.
During the last weeks this process took too much time and wasn't error-free.  Now it seems OK.

This week was also a good week for DX :  P29, A25, EL, ZS, ZL, T6, TO2D, FP and CY9 were added to the log.