[Today’s run: 2 miles with wife and dog]<\/p>\n
Last weekend was the CQ Magazine Worldwide DX Sideband contest.\u00a0 Next weekend is the ARRL CW Sweepstakes.\u00a0 At the end of the month is the CQ WWDX CW contest.<\/p>\n
There are contests of some sort almost every weekend but this stretch through November holds some of the bigger ones.<\/p>\n
I don’t do a lot of serious contesting.\u00a0 But I do enjoy participating in the Sweepstakes and a few of the others, mostly the CW and VHF ones.\u00a0 They are a good opportunity to get in some serious code practice and maybe pick up some DX (foreign stations).<\/p>\n
Contests will each have their own set of rules.\u00a0 Generally what you are doing is making short contacts with as many stations as possible.\u00a0 There may be time limits on when you can operate.\u00a0 There are usually power output limits. They will have some sort of defined conversation or exchange that you have to perform with all of the stations you connect to.\u00a0 The idea is to make it not too strenuous, but a definite exchange of information so that no one can turn in a log of phony activity.<\/p>\n
Logs.\u00a0 If you want to be scored in the contest you turn in a log of your contacts with the exchanged information for each.\u00a0 The contest organizers usually want a computer formatted log (there are a few well defined formats).\u00a0 They can feed those into a database and do cross checking.\u00a0 Yes, there are people who will cheat if they can.<\/p>\n
I have zero chance of winning any given contest, but certain ones have a particular style of activity\u00a0 (ARRL Sweepstakes) or bring out the\u00a0 rare operations.\u00a0 And I enjoy participating a little bit.<\/p>\n
As in any hobby, there are people who have a lot of extra money and are willing to spend it to build a winning station.\u00a0\u00a0 I can’t compete with that.\u00a0 But what I do get is a time-compressed conglomeration of interesting stations wanting to talk to me.\u00a0\u00a0 All of those guys with the winning stations need guys like me to participate in the contest.\u00a0\u00a0 In a foot race a lone runner can win.\u00a0 But in a radio contest you have to have contacts.\u00a0 So the king of the hill has to have the cooperation of lots of other stations.\u00a0 Meaning, he wants to talk to any little-bitty squeak-mouse, chirpy, swoopy, drifty station he can possibly find.\u00a0\u00a0 (It’s nice to be needed.)<\/p>\n
Another angle is the traveling contester.\u00a0 You can _rent_ a good station in a place like Aruba or the Galapagos Islands (or North Dakota), as a vacation.\u00a0 Your family can go see all the sites while you sit in a little building making an enormous number of radio contacts day and night.\u00a0 Sound like fun?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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[Today’s run: 2 miles with wife and dog] Last weekend was the CQ Magazine Worldwide DX Sideband contest.\u00a0 Next weekend is the ARRL CW Sweepstakes.\u00a0 At the end of the month is the CQ WWDX CW contest. There are contests of some sort almost every weekend but this stretch through November holds some of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio","category-operating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1681"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1683,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions\/1683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}