It’s a slow time for contesting but building your station is a great way to while away the summer. In fact, come September, October and November, you’ll be thankful for every little improvement you made over the summer months.

It’s no fun climbing a tower or working on antennas when it’s snowing and minus 20 degrees outside. So get it done now and be ready for the fall contest season.

We’ll talk about summer projects and more in episode 11 of Zone Zero…

Welcome to Zone Zero, the ham radio contesting podcast.

This is Bud, VA7ST, looking ahead to the North American QSO Party CW contest, on August 5 and 6 this year.

It’s 12 hours of intensive Morse code action on all bands from 10 through 160 meters, running a maximum of 100 watts.

For my money, the NAQP contests are about as enjoyable as it gets — casual, without a lot of over-powered signals jamming up the bands. It’s a very friendly outing with a bunch of mates — all the regulars you run into many weekends a year and lots of drop-ins and others new to contesting. In fact, the exchange between stations is your name and state or province, rather than an impersonal serial number.

You can only operate for 10 or the 12 hours, and off-times must be 30 minutes or longer. How you spread out your breaks is up to you, but remember some stations might run the first 10 hours straight and won’t be on the lower bands in the final two hours. While others will be there, and the more states and provinces you can land on 80M and 160M, the higher and more competitive your score will be.

My advice is to leave yourself time to get on for the final hour, at least, and pick up the multipliers just waiting for you to show up on 80M and 160M.

As always with the NAQP, you’ll need to decide what’s most important to you: racking up the most contacts by calling CQ and letting stations come to you, or searching for as many multipliers as you can. I usually try to strike a balance between these strategies.

I am always aware of the rarity of the VE7 or British Columbia multiplier, if few of my fellow Orca DXCC operators are on the air. If BC is rare in the NAQP, I will spend a lot more time running stations – eventually, even the rarest states will want BC in the log and chances are they will find me.

That’s my theory for NAQP, anyway. Doesn’t always work out, but that is part of the fun of contesting – you never get the same thing twice, and there’s always something new to challenge your skills and strategies.

Upgrading the station

Over the past few weeks, I have been working through a bunch of projects in preparation for the fall contest season. The key projects are:

Cabling for second radio: My old second radio is an FT-920, which I love, but it is now an older rig. I’ve put it into third-radio backup position now that I have a new the new Icom IC-7100 in the shack – it’s a cute but capable little friend for the FT-920 and my primary radio, an FT-2000.

I have the I C-7100 running 6M and 2M digital audio-based modes including the new and remarkable FT8 mode and meteor scatter using MSK144 mode. Now I need to get things going for CW, Phone and RTTY.

I am slowly working away at getting the CW and RTTY cabling set up between the contesting computer and radio, which meant building an FSK and CW keying circuit into a DB9 connector, and soldering up the correct connectors for the radio end of the cabling. It’s more complicated than it sounds, but one more evening ought to do it.

6M yagi upgrade: The other project is also a VHF radio improvement. I have a three-element Steppir yagi on the tower outside, and it has a fourth element – a passive, fixed aluminum director – making four elements on 6M. But,