Foundations of Amateur Radio

Today I'm going to look at the actual on-air activity of the contest. Previously I've talked about the preparation and planning, as well as the doing, in terms of mechanics, what to bring, where to put it and how to power it all.

At the most basic level, a contest is a combination of two things, making and taking calls. It's an important point, so I'll say it again. A contest is two things, sitting on a frequency and call CQ and have other stations call you, and, it's also hunting up and down the dial finding other stations who are calling CQ.

These two sides, being the instigator of the contact, and being the responder, are needed to make points. Even the most advanced contest station with multiple operators and transmitters will do both these things and when you're on your own you too need to do this.

One reason for this is that in a contest others are doing the exact same thing. They're also swapping between both these activities to pick up extra points and multipliers.

Another reason is propagation. Your station is unique. It has a unique radiation pattern, a unique location, a unique audience of stations that can hear you at any one time. Across the duration of the contest this will change as day turns into night and night back into day. If you're mobile, there is an additional variable, your location which will affect your audience every time you move.

If those two reasons were not enough, here's one more. How do you know if the band your on is working or not? How do you know if there are others nearby, or on a completely different part of the band, or, if the band is open or closed, or if solar conditions have shifted and a band has been affected?

For my contest I had a vertical antenna mounted on my car. I can use it to operate on the bands I'm allowed to use, 10m, 15m, 40m and 80m. For this contest, my go-to band was 40m. Local conditions dictate that when dusk arrives, the lower part, 7.0 to 7.150 is all but unusable due to heavy interference from non-amateur stations overseas, so I picked a spot near 7.190 and used that as my calling frequency.

Of course, as was expected, not everyone got the memo that I'd be up at that end of the band, and the little flag I posted saying that this was my frequency was dutifully ignored by everyone.

What I'm saying is that there is no such thing as "my calling frequency", just the place where you like to call and you have to manage this along the duration of the contest, since others will find your little hidey-hole and use it at the drop of a hat. And if you're QRP like me, they might even just start calling CQ right over the top of you and you'll find that you think you're making contacts with stations that are not actually talking to you. In other words, be flexible.

As a rule, for myself, having been bitten by this many times, I don't QSY to another band if a station I've just worked asks to do so, since the aim for your contest is for you to make contacts, not for someone else to make them. That's not to say that if it's 3 o'clock in the morning and nothing much is happening this won't change. Again, flexibility is key.

I tend to use both VFO A and VFO B on my radio. It's a quick way to swap between frequencies or bands and it allows you to both sit on a frequency, calling CQ and hunt up and down the band at the same time. If that doesn't make sense to you, this is how I do this.

I set my calling frequency up on VFO A and copy that to VFO B. I call CQ a few times on VFO A, swap to VFO B, scan up or down a little way, find a station that I'd like to work and swap back to VFO A, call CQ a few more times, swap back to VFO B, hear the station finish their call and hear them call CQ. I respond and if they hear me, I make the contact. If not, I swap back to VFO A, call CQ and do it all again. This way I can be in one place calling CQ and pick up contacts at the same time.

If you have multiple radios, even as a single operator, you can do this and pipe the audio from one radio into one ear and the audio from the other radio into the other ear and do both at the same time. You can even combine the two and have four frequencies you work on. This requires practice, and you must make sure that both radios are not on the same band, ever, otherwise you'll likely blow up the second one while transmitting on the first.

Next time I'll look at what worked and what didn't, the aftermath.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB