Foundations of Amateur Radio

Today I'm going to talk about the doing of a contest. Previously I discussed the preparation and you can go back to that and have a listen online, search iTunes for my callsign, VK6FLAB.

The contest I participated in was a 24 hour contest. It started at 2pm local time on a Saturday and ran the whole 24 hours. If I was sitting in a shack, I might have and in the past actually have, operated during most of that.

Seeing that this time around I was planning to be mobile, I needed to get sleep in between driving from location to location.

In my car I have a suction cup stuck to the front windscreen which holds the head of my radio. It's mostly within reach, but if I operate for a little while, extending my arm gets tiring, so if that's the case, I drop the steering wheel, push it forward and modify my seat position.

A better solution would be to find a better location, but I've not managed that yet. I keep looking at other set-ups, but haven't found one that works for me. I'll let you know if I do.

My logging is done on a computer. A net-book. It's small, light and pretty responsive. It's running Windows XP, never connects to the 'net and it works. I balance it on my knee when entering contacts, or have it on the passenger seat and tap into it that way. Also not ideal.

I saw a series of photos where a fellow traveller had used a plastic sewer pipe, and bend, to push into the cup-holder of the centre console and mount their computer on that. I've not yet travelled to the hardware store, but I can see a future where that might occur.

Power for the laptop comes from a 12V power supply. It's plugged into the cigarette lighter, set to the voltage of my computer and plugged in. It has a handy USB socket on the power supply that I use to keep my phone charged. That sits on another suction cup on the dashboard in a mount. It showed me where I was and where the boundaries of operation where. Every now and then I even used it as a phone.

Speaking about power. I power my radio with a 12V battery that's sitting in the boot.

At night, finding the right keys to press is a challenge. The interior light of the car is one option, but I find it makes too much light, draws too much attention and uses more power than I'm willing to use. Instead I use an LED headlamp. I was wearing it for a while, but a better solution turned out to be attaching it to the sun visor where it still is.

In terms of feeding and watering, for water I had about six bottles of water lying in the passenger seat foot-well. For food, a small insulated bag with fruit, apples, pears and a banana. I stayed away from nuts, sugar and other traditional stay-awake foods, because I find that I over eat, get sleepy and become less productive.

In between locations I'd turn the radio volume down, turn on some classical music and let my mind relax a little.

I drove about 300km during the 24 hours. Operated from 2pm until about 10pm and from about 5am to 2pm, a total of 17 hours. I managed to have a sausage roll for breakfast, not recommended, a few cups of coffee in the morning - keeping my eyes peeled for a coffee place at 5am paid off at 7am.

I wore comfortable shoes, a t-shirt and jeans. Next time I'll wear shorts or tracksuit pants. The belt really didn't work for me for that extended period of time sitting in a car.

Next time I'll talk about the operation during the contest.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB