DELARANEWS

Contesting

Contest schedule

January 13 4 States QRP Group Second Sunday Sprint January 14 Classic Exchange, CW January 15 QRP Fox Hunt Phone Fray CWops Mini-CWT Test January 16 CWops Mini-CWT Test NAQCC CW Sprint January 17 NCCC RTTY Sprint QRP Fox Hunt NCCC Sprint LZ Open Contest January 18 Hungarian DX Contest RSGB AFS Contest, SSB North American QSO Party, SSB NA Collegiate Championship, SSB ARRL January VHF Contest WAB 1.8 MHz Phone/CW Feld Hell Sprint January 19 Feld Hell Sprint January 20 Run for the Bacon QRP Contest January 22 SKCC Sprint QRP Fox Hunt Phone Fray CWops Mini-CWT Test DX Engineering's blog has a recent article by Ward, N0AX, entitled Station Improvements: Inside During the Winter. Ergonomics and record keeping are front and center in his suggestions. The January ARRL VHF Contest is the weekend of January 18, 2020. For FT8/FT4 operators, this is another opportunity to participate in a contest! Don't forget that other modes can be used on the same band. It can be an easy way to pick up additional points and grids. Don't forget to cheer on those college and universities that compete in the North American Collegiate Challenge while you're making contacts in the NAQP Phone Contest. If you don't see your alma mater listed in the competitor pre-registration, you should encourage the radio club to sign up! In 2020, you'll need 84 sections to get a clean sweep in the ARRL Sweepstakes! "The Radio Amateurs of Canada announced a new section," so Prince Edward Island gets its own section starting on April 1. Also on April 1, some amateurs currently in the ONS section will find themselves in the GTA section. When entering one of the assisted classes in a contest, you'll probably be receiving spots from a telnet cluster. Finding one that meets your needs for availability and reliability is a task to do before a contest. Tim, N3QE, suggested a number of CC Cluster sites that "...are active and have reversebeacon.net spots" in a recent message to the N1MM Logger+ group. The 46 (and counting) message topic has a number of suggestions which may help you use spots more effectively in various situations. The 31st Annual Dayton Top Band Dinner will be Friday, May 15, 2020, and registrations are being accepted on the website. While you're registering for that, check out the ContestSuperSuite.com website, which has been updated for 2020. KB6NU's recent blog entry describes LadderSnaps, a ladder line insulator that converts "home center" 14 AWG THHN wire into feedline for your antennas. KB6NU also talks about some Anderson Powerpole distribution blocks by K9JEB. Powerpole connectors are available in a wide variety of sizes and colors - K9ZW's blog entry in December described the variations. Inexpensive software defined radio hardware arguably started a few years ago with the availability of DVB-T USB "dongles." These were devices that were originally designed to receive over the air digital TV broadcasts using a PC as the decoder and display. But these devices had the ability to receive arbitrary swaths of spectrum. The RTL-SDR project was born to tune the devices and grab raw samples for other software to process. A Hackaday article by Tom Nardi describes how these devices and RTL-SDR have evolved, and how an ecosystem of tools and software have grown around them. =ARRL Contest letter