2015-09-27
I participated in the CQ WW RTTY contest
Much of this weekend was filled up but I noticed really heavy RTTY activity on the radio bands Saturday evening. Looking at the PG7V contestcalendar showed me the CQ World Wide RTTY Contest 2015 was busy in full force. I participated for about two and a half hours on Sunday between other things and managed a nice 54 contacts. It is a quite busy contest with lots of stations participating. There are probably 'contest stations' that participate for the full 48 hours and make thousands and thousands of contacts. For me only 'search and pounce' mode worked, nobody came back to my calling attempts. This is probably related to my modest output power and antenna setup. Getting the log accepted was a whole different problem and in hindsight it was the wrong decision to try to get that done late Sunday evening. The logging format for this contest is quite strict (and somewhat US-centric) and it took me a few iterations to get the log right to have it accepted for processing. According to the documentation fldigi does the cabrillo export right for the various contests but I noticed some problems with it. On further reading I notice I have to set up the contest macros before I start logging for a contest. Which means I have to prepare a bit more for a contest than the usual "Something is going on, let's jump in". The fldigi site has a document FLDIGI Contest - How To which I should read and use for the next contest! Update 2016-07-17: From time to time I checked the CQ World Wide RTTY contest results but it took a while. The results were published in May 2016. In total 52 contacts accepted, 6 zones, 22 countries, 4 contacts in USA/Canada.