[Today’s run: Watson Road 3.5 miles]<\/p>\n
One of my favorite ham radio contests is the ARRL Sweepstakes.\u00a0 They split it up into two parts, one for CW (morse code) and one for phone (voice), and it happens in November.<\/p>\n
The goal is to talk to as many other hams\u00a0 in the US\/Canada as possible.\u00a0 If\u00a0 you get at least one contact from each of 83 regions you have a “clean sweep”.<\/p>\n
The contest period is something like 36 hours.\u00a0 I maybe operated for 5 hours and I had 100 contacts.\u00a0 (The big contest stations will have way over a thousand.)\u00a0 This year I tried a different strategy.\u00a0 Instead of tuning around and answering other people’s calls, I picked a good spot and called.\u00a0 The rhythm of operation is a bit different.\u00a0 That’s the first time I have done the bulk of a contest in such a manner.\u00a0 I enjoyed it.<\/p>\n
The radio I am using these days is not a good contest radio.\u00a0 It is a Direct Conversion receiver, so you hear every station on both sides of the zero-beat.\u00a0 It makes for a very crowded band.\u00a0 I attempted to put myself on the high side of the contest activity.\u00a0 When things got rough I moved up.\u00a0 At one time I was operating between RTTY stations on 20 meters.\u00a0 I did get some replies.\u00a0 But somebody also sent, “ARE YOU LOST?”\u00a0 so maybe I’ll come up with a different strategy for next year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: Watson Road 3.5 miles] One of my favorite ham radio contests is the ARRL Sweepstakes.\u00a0 They split it up into two parts, one for CW (morse code) and one for phone (voice), and it happens in November. The goal is to talk to as many other hams\u00a0 in the US\/Canada as possible.\u00a0 If\u00a0 […]<\/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-3103","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\/3103","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=3103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3105,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3103\/revisions\/3105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}