Ham Radio – Page 4 – Deep Space Exploration Society

2016 ARRL CW Sweepstakes – We Won 1st Place for Colorado !

Last November (2016) we tried participating in our first contest. This was the annual ARRL Sweepstakes for CW (Morse Code).

The goal of this contest is to contact hams across the U.S. and Canada. As such, it is usually a sociably friendly event. Your points do get multiplied for each ARRL geographical Section you contact. Some Sections are whole states or provinces, like Colorado is its own Section. Some populous states though have a few Sections within them, for example California. If you contact all the Sections in one contest, that is called a “Clean Sweep”, hence the name of the contest. That is a lot of work. For many hams, though, this is just for fun, and a chance to make contacts with other folks in other places. I was looking forward to having some fun making contacts from our site, and bringing our club call sign K0PRT on to the air.

To our surprise we just received a certificate from the ARRL that we won First Place in our category for Colorado! Our category was Muli-Operator (for two or more hams operating) Low Power (less than 150 watts).

We actually only made 8 contacts for the contest: 6 on 20 meters and 2 on 15 meters, to 7 states. Then at that point we discovered our CW signal had a chirp. We were operating on battery power from the site. And when we drew current as we pushed down the telegraph key, the voltage dropped too much. Later we added a regulated power supply to our ham station to solve that problem. But on that day we decided we should just stop, as our signal sounded awful.

And yet, what we did was enough in our category to still earn First Place!

We operated for the contest from our Communications Trailer. The photos are from that day.

Sometimes there are not many stations operating in a contest as multi-operator low power. I investigated into the contest records, and that was the case this time. That said, I am still proud of what we did. Bringing together a team to operate and have fun is not necessarily easy. And we did this at our remote site. Our category has its challenges. Congratulations to our Club! We earned a First Place certificate. We will have more opportunities.

– Gary WA2JQZ

2017-09-02 DSES Plishner Site Work Trip Report

Here is a summary from our work trip to the Plishner Radio Telescope site on Saturday September 2, 2017. It includes many photos of what we did. Highlights include:

Work started on rebuilding the bunker ramp retaining wall
Work on the control boxes which control the azimuth and elevation pointing of the 60 foot antenna
Maintenance and calibration of the Radio Jove and total power measurement instruments
Positioning the 60 foot antenna for detecting radio source Cygnus A during drift scan
Colorado ham radio QSO Party participation

The summary report was written by DSES Secretary Bill Miller. The ham radio report was written by Gary Agranat. Click the link to see the report in PDF.

2017-09-02 DSES Plishner Site Work Trip Report rev3

ARRL DX CW contest – 2017 February 18

Posted February 26, 2017, updated March 2.

Last weekend, while we were working on the radio telescope (reinstalling the antenna feed at the focus), we also spent a few hours participating in the ARRL DX CW contest. This is an annual ham radio contest sponsored by the ARRL, done in two parts. In February (this month) is the contest for using Morse Code (CW). In March is the contest for using voice. The goal is for hams in the continental U.S. and Canada to contact hams everywhere else, and vice versa. We used our ham radio station at the site, which includes a 100 watt transceiver, an antenna tuner, and a folded dipole suspended above the communications trailer. For sending code we used just a straight traditional key.

We succeeded in making 27 contacts with 18 overseas DX locations. These are the places we contacted:

Antigua & Barbuda
Argentina
Aruba
Bonaire
Brazil
Cape Verde
Cayman Island
Chile
Columbia
Costa Rica
Hawaii
Jamaica
Montserrat
Tonga
Turks & Caicos Islands
Uruguay
U.S. Virgin Islands
Venezuela

A31MM in Tonga was a nice surprise, and was our longest-distance contact, at 6600 miles. Tonga is in the western Pacific, north of New Zealand. That and D4C in Cape Verde (about 4500 miles distance) took some patience and skill, but they were worth the effort as those are not common DX to work.

We mostly used the 15-meter band, which had good propagation openings to the Caribbean and across the equator. If you look on a globe or world map, Tonga and Cape Verde are across the equator from Colorado. That suggests we benefitted from Trans Equatorial Propagation (TEP). We managed to hear one station in Europe, in Poland, but couldn’t make the contact. 20 meters was heavily crowded with domestic stations (which we couldn’t contact in this contest), and so we didn’t use that band much. The 10-meter band was open enough that we made our Chile contact there. On Log Book of the World, which we need for the DXCC award, we received so far 12 confirmations:

Argentina LU4EG
Aruba P40R
Bonaire PJ4X
Brazil PP5NY
Cape Verde D4C
Costa Rica TI5W
Hawaii KH6LC, WH7W
Tonga A31MM
Turks & Caicos Islands VP5K
Uruguay CW5W
U.S. Virgin Islands KP2M
Venezuela YV5OIE

I expect most 0f the rest of our contacts will confirm on Log Book of the World in the near future, as this sort of contest is commonly used to achieve credits toward DXCC.

We also started to receive confirmations on eQSL as well. See the accompanying card images bel0w.

These contests are generally fun and good learning experiences. We can participate in more in the future. I will be happy to help anyone in the group take part while we are at the site. Contests can help develop good ham skills – including developing good operator practices and learning first-hand how propagation can change during the day across the bands. You can be at any experience level, including beginner. With some experience, you may find yourself developing some strategies. Contests also can be fun geography lessons. You can contact hams in so many different places, including places you didn’t know about.

73, Gary WA2JQZ