For a while I have been thinking about participating in Parks on the Air. This is an amateur radio program promoting outdoor activity by letting people activate park locations all over the world by making contacts from that special location and having other people chase these contacts. Both of these activities will collect points making for ranked lists and certificates which can be collected.

The treshold for a succesfull activation of a park in the POTA program is low: only 10 contacts from a park between 00:00 UTC and 23:59 UTC are needed. This makes activating multiple parks in a day or as a lunchtime activity possible.

I have been watching videos about Parks on the Air, from KB9VBR Antennas and the official Parks On The Air YouTube channel. And I like to read posts about POTA activations on peoples' websites and social media. But I needed to stop doing theory about this and do an actual activation myself. I mentioned yesterday on mastodon Lots of radio amateurs active from summits/parks! I must go do this myself in a nearby park and got positive responses where I mentioned @ei8kd I have the gear, I just need to find time to be away from the family and kick myself out the door.

Conclusion: time to stop thinking and start doing. Today was the chance: no plans for the afternoon and the rest of the family was doing things at home and didn't mind having me leave the house.

So today I wanted to do my first POTA activation at a nearby park: Noorderparkruigenhoek National Park which has never been activated in morse.

In preparation I have the gear with choice between the linked dipole antenna on the fiber mast for 15/20/40 meter band or the multiband vertical antenna tested for the 20, 17, 15 meter bands.

I bought/built the multiband vertical to be easily deployable in situations like this, so I packed that. And a sealed lead-acid battery, the FT-857D radio including microphone, a small CW key, antenna cable, power cable, headphones, a notebook and pen. And the smartphone with the Ham2K PoLo BETA logging app.

I packed the gear in the bag I normally use for taking my laptop to work. It turned out the bag with the heavy equipment was too heavy to hang from the back of my recumbent bicycle so I used the bicycle trailer.

In the park I searched for a place to set up. It would have been nice to find a parkbench a bit out of the way but parkbenches are set up for people who use the main walking/cycle paths and they all had people sitting there. So I found a grassy area within the park and started to set up the antenna and the radio. This was somewhat close to the high voltage line running through the park.

I first set up the antenna for 15 meter CW. The radio kept complaining about the standing wave ratio, but this was fixed when I connected the antenna cable to the radio.

Giving CQ with the small CW paddle gave problems, the paddle kept adding a dash after certain dots. It seems the small CW paddle was set too tight, pressing on it made it also send out dashes. After tapping on it a bit and moving it around the top of the radio where it was sitting (with magnets) made that problem go away.

This made giving CQ as PE4KH/P hard so I decided after a few tries to make it easier and use my call PE4KH without the 'portable' modifier. Sending morse with the paddle wasn't easy, I haven't practised much lately, I'm used to using the computer with the radio at home.

But: nobody came back to me on 15 meter CW. I spotted my activity on the pota.app site but that didn't change things. I switched to 17 meter CW where there was some more activity. I called CQ in morse a number of times. I also spotted myself on the pota.app site on that frequency. It sometimes seemed a call came back to me but they seemed in a different contact, maybe there was a DXpedition working split. Also in voice on the 17m band nobody came back and people I tried calling didn't hear me.

After that it was time to pack up and go home to be in time for dinner preparations.

One thing I wanted to avoid was people asking questions or reacting negative to me being busy with radio which is why I searched for a spot out of the way, but reachable by walking my bicycle over there. I saw several people walking dogs near where I sat, but nobody seemed to mind. Some people said 'good afternoon' and left it at that.

In the end: 0 contacts. But a learning experience. And I finally did that first activation attempt I had been (over) thinking about for ages.

Things learned:

• The radio plus battery (and other gear) is too heavy to hang from the (lightweight) luggage rack at the back of my recumbent bicycle.
• I can find a spot in that park
• Headphones don't work with a hat in the sun
• But earbuds are fine for radio outdoors, there is not a lot of noise around
• I need to check the HF bands before such an activity, to know where to start and what antenna to bring
• On the 15 and 17 meter band the multiband vertical works fine
• Having the 40 meter band available during the day can be helpful for days with bad propagation
• I need to have a list on paper of POTA frequencies on all bands I can be active on
• That same bit of paper could also have the standard lines to send
• I need to practise more with sending morse by paddle
• People with dogs don't mind other activities in the park
• The multiband vertical antenna isn't very obtrusive in a field of high grass
• I like having a notebook to write down calls when I first hear them, but logging will probably be nice with the Ham2K PoLO app.

Today I managed to get 9M1Z in the log in FT8 on the 20m band. This gives me East Malaysia as new DXCC entry.

I also worked for a while on getting 8Q7JF in morse, but the reception on that side was not very good and a lot more amateurs tried to get that station in the log. I already have Maldives in digital modes, so I concentrate on morse.

2024-06-19: Saint Vincent & Grenadines

Not due to a DXpedition but due to someone enjoying a holiday: today I had a contact with J88IH on Saint Vincent and the Grenadines which is an island country in the Carribean.

The chase for new countries/entities is always on, and there usually more DXpeditions during the peak of the solar cycle, because of the better propagation on HF allowing for more contacts.

Glorioso Islands

Currently there is a DXpediton on Glorioso Islands: FT4GL Glorioso Island - dx-world.net.

This is one person visiting the Grande Glorieuse for work with doing radio in spare time, but with Glorioso Islands ranked #7 most-wanted a lot of amateurs want to get in the log. So I was expecting this one to be hard or impossible. Adding morse will not happen: this one man DXpedition is not doing morse at all.

I got FT4GL in the log on 12 meter FT8 last Friday evening without needing a lot of work on it.

I have the transcript of the contact (with FT8 this is possible) and it's showing the complete exchange with final confirmation from the remote station, but I'm not showing up in the online logs. Weird.

Today I added FT4GL on 10 meter FT8, but their closing RR73 did not decode on my side. I got a reasonably good signal report, so I think I may be in the log on 10 meter FT8, but that's also a question mark for now. Later I had a full contact on 10 meter, with the RR73 seen.

Niger

The 5U5K DXpedition is in Niger. I managed the contact today on 10 meter FT8. This took part of the day, they were active but not a lot of stations could decode their signals and most of the time they didn't decode me. In the beginning of the afternoon the contact was made. I hope to add more bands and morse later.

St. Helena

Andy Chadwick ZD7VJ is active from St. Helena. In morse! So now in the log.

Update thanks to log checking

With DXpeditions that have (limited) Internet access it is possible to check the logs while the DXpedition is still active. It turns out I am in the log of FT4GL twice now on 10m FT8 and not on 12m FT8. And I'm good in the log at 5U5K. On to 5U5K on more bands and in CW, and more entities!

In the intersection of radio, networks and security I had a look at some Ethernet over cable devices in the past: a the Corinex CXWC-HD200-WNeH, a Cab.Link CLS-D4E2WX1 router and a Corinex HD200 CableLAN Wall Mount Adapter CXC-HD200-WMEe.

All these devices didn't want to establish a link on the 'cable' side because there was no Ethernet over cable master device. This has changed: I now have some hardware that should be able to perform the master role for Corinex Ethernet over cable.

I also have some pieces of 75 ohm coax cable, splitters and attenuators. Those attenuators will be needed because I don't have kilometers of coax cable to span, so I'm not losing as much signal as those masters are expecting.

This hardware is from holiday parks that switched from Corinex Ethernet over cable and other Ethernet over cable devices to newer standards. With Ethernet over cable both directions (upstream and downstream) share the same bit of spectrum, which makes amplification of signals for longer cables impossible.

So now to find time to set up a mini cable network and have a look at the master systems, their controls, the possible speeds, the security of the masters and the RF spectrum used by this system.

The standards

I should dive into the exact standards behind this a bit more. I'm very sure it's not docsis which has separate downstream and upstream frequencies. For as far as I can see this is a HomePNA implementation similar to powerline. Source: Ethernet over coax - wikipedia.

Last weekend was the CQ World Wide WPX CW Contest 2024 edition.

I planned to participate, so I made sure the TLF Linux based contest logger was set up correctly and ready to log contacts. Since this contest is supported by default in TLF I didn't have to do much.

I participated on Saturday and Sunday most moments I could get behind the radio. I found out the internal tuner of the FT-991a radio is able to tune the CW portion of the 15 meter band on my 10-20-40 meter endfed, so I made contacts on that band too. I don't think the outgoing signal is very strong, but it's another band for contacts! On Saturday the 10, 15 and 20 meter bands had good propagation, on Sunday the 10 meter band gave no new contacts and no response to a CQ call.

Most contacts were 'search and pounce' but calling CQ also gave results on a busy band. The balance is between finding interesting multipliers with search and pounce (searching the band for stations) or working lots of contacts calling CQ.

The results according to TLF:

                                             Band   160   80   40   20   15   10
                                             QSO      0    0    0  166   53   31
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                             Pts: 334  Mul: 194 Score: 64796    

In earlier contests I thought using the 15 meter band could add results, this seems to be true.

This weekend was the His Majesty the King of Spain CW Contest organized by the Spanish amateur radio club URE.

I planned to participate in advance. The propagation wasn't very great on Saturday, during the day I heard nothing on the 10 meter amateur band and I made contacts on the 20 meter amateur band. Late in the evening I made contacts on the 40 meter band. There was some nice DX on the 20 meter band early in the evening: I had contacts with stations in Thailand and Japan. On Sunday the propagation was better with activity on the 10 meter band as well, but it was still 'scraping for contacts'. Although I planned to get at least 100 contacts I stopped at 97 contacts before the contest was really over because it was getting really hard to find new calls and I felt like it was time to stop.

My approach was to search and pounce on other stations. I have called CQ a number of times but no responses came.

The results according to TLF:

Band   160   80   40   20   15   10
QSO      0    0   23   65    0    9
Mult     0    0   16   36    0    6
                                   
Pts: 133  Mul: 58 Score: 7714      

And the multiplier score is even better: at this moment TLF cannot deal with the fact that the first contact in one of the Spanish DXCC entities (Spain has EA: main land spain, EA6: Balearic Islands, EA8: Canary Islands and EA9: Ceuta and Melilla) counts as two multipliers: one for the country and one for the Spanish province.

Rules file and multiplier plugin for TLF

On Friday evening I set to write a rules file and a scoring plugin for TLF Linux based contest logger which was a last-minute action but I hoped it would help me see the multipliers better. Which it did!

Getting this added in TLF

I shared the rules and plugin on the tlf-devel mailing list and I was invited to create a pull request to make this part of the code of TLF so others can use TLF for this contest easily. I had to look up how to do all this (I'm not active with git daily) but it's now a pull request: Adding His Majesty King of Spain CW/SSB contest by KHoos · Pull Request #434 · Tlf/tlf.

2024-06-18: Preliminary results are in

I have a preliminary scoring result which shows there are only two errors in my log: one wrong callsign and one wrong exchange. Which is nice! As usual the URE log checking is very fast.

Now I need to find a bit of time to check whether the multiplier count in 'my' eakingofspain.py plugin agrees with the scoring done in the log checking process.

2024-06-19: checks done, my code is now in TLF

Today I checked the multipliers scored by the URE against what my plugin calculated and found no differences. I reported this in the pull request and to the tlf-devel mailing list, and the pull-request was accepted: Adding rules for the His Majesty King of Spain CW/SSB contests (#434) · Tlf/tlf@6fe0a15 · GitHub.

Final results published

The final results have been published: His Majesty The King of Spain CW Contest Results – Concursos URE where I am ranked #216 in the "Single operator Multiband Low Power DX" category.

I recently saw a QYT KT-WP12 2m/70cm radio offered for a nice price and bought it. The difference with the QYT KT-8900 radio is that the display is in the hand microphone, which would make usage in the car easier for me.

The radio has a 3.5mm jack connector hiding behind a little cover with screws for programming. I wanted to get in to program the channels and change some other settings. To program this radio needs a 'daily' version of Chirp radio programming software so I downloaded and installed this using the instructions Running CHIRP on Linux with the .whl package.

Upon trying the download from the radio with the QYT KT-8900 programming cable I created in 2016 the radio just rebooted and the software gave an error. This could be a problem with the software or with the cable, so I started a search for the official QYT software for Windows. On the first Windows system the cable didn't want to work at all because the cable has a PL2303 chipset which is really unsupported in Windows 11. I dug up an older and slower laptop with Windows 10, and there I had to downgrade the existing PL2303 drivers to make communication possible. How to do that was found via Prolific USB-to-serial comm port windows 10 which mentions Fake PL2303 – how to install on Windows 8.1 - BartB which also worked for Windows 10.

Finally I was able to test the official QYT software and that showed the same problem, so for now I think the problem is in the cable.

The Build your Own 3 PIN Programming Cable BTech, QYT, etc Mobile - by John 'Miklor' K3NXU has a remark which seems to be about this problem but I can't be sure as the video is offline:

Ezequiel Welcomme LU9MWE (Argentina) brought to my attention that some models only work with the original cable (Chinese). Using an aftermarket or homemade cable may result in the radio cycling or pulsing when trying to communicate with the software. (Pulsing VIDEO).

The solution is to place a reference to GND in the communication lines. This is done by adding two 10K ohm resistors. One between GND - RX, and the other between GND - TX.

I asked whether the person selling me the radio still had the cable and I will receive it soon and test with that cable. That cable I made back then was later modified to have both 3.5mm jack plug for the QYT radio and the connector for baofeng / wouxun radio's, so I'm not keen on modifying it even further at the moment.

Update 2023-05-22: interesting results with the right cable

I received the cable and tested with it. First the official QYT KT-WP12 / QYT 9900 software on the older Windows 10 laptop. It still had the radio rebooting and showing a communications error. But the same cable with chirp worked and I was able to download the current memories and settings and upload my own list of channels and modify settings. So this radio now works for me and I can use it with my own programming.

The last months a large number of my contacts have been chasing special event stations. There are quite a number of those on-air at the moment. And I was active with another special event station with our radio club!

75 years Union of Spanish Radio Amateurs (URE)

The Union of Spanish Radio Amateurs or Unión de Radioaficionados Españoles celebrates their 75th anniversary with a big event: 75 anniversary of the union of spanish radio amateurs (URE) award with a lot of stations active on all HF, VHF/UHF bands and satellites. From the Netherlands with my station I can contact them on a number of HF bands and I have been making contacts at a high rate. I concentrate on morse, but I also like having them in the log in other modes. So far I have managed to get enough bandslots for the Silver award. With the current propagation I can get Spain nicely on the 40, 20 and 17 meter amateur bands. For most of April getting the Spanish stations on 12 and 10 meter was impossible.

100 years German funkkartel

The German radio amateurs are also celebrating the founding of the first radio amateur clubs in Germany 100 years ago with special event stations. 100 Jahre Deutsches Funk-Kartells lists history and the special event actions. I also chase these, mostly in morse again, but also in other modes. So far I have managed to get these on the 40 meter, 30 meter and 20 meter amateur bands.

Being part of a special event

On 20 april 2024 I was part of the crew activating PH75NAVO from the old command and communication bunker on Soesterberg Air Force Base. We were allowed to set up our radios inside the bunker and an antenna outside. I didn't make a lot of connections as operator, but we had fun setting up, looking around, explaining amateur radio to visitors and generally having a nice day. Lots of positive feedback and the foundation that controls the old airbase as a nature reserve was very happy to have us visit!

During that weekend there were no FT8 connections which were 'promised'. I made up for that by activating the special call on Wednesday 24 April in FT8/FT4 ending with 218 extra connections in the log.

Reporting in Dutch: PH75NAVO op 20/21 april actief - VERON A08 - Centrum, PH75NAVO, geslaagde activatie vanaf vliegbasis Soesterberg! - VERON A08 - Centrum.

I haven't cycled a long distance in a long time because reasons but I seriously want to be able to do those distances. The best way to work on this is the approach of just doing it. So I took a day off recently, was blessed with nice weather and I cycled almost 84 kilometers from Utrecht to Schoonhoven and back.

The most important thing I learned was to eat before I got hungry, so to bring enough food which gives the right kind of nutrition. And enough water.

I have a strong wish to cycle to a place which is about 120 kilometers from our house, I think I can do this given enough time, the right planning and enough food and water. In the past my wife and I have once cycled 180 kilometers in one day and have experience with over 100 kilometer days on cycling holidays.

I also brought a handheld radio along which transmitted my location to APRS. But as soon as I was out of the range of my own aprs receiver at home I fell off the APRS map and didn't return until I got close to our house again.

Yet more countries showing up and making the contact. This time both were only in digital mode (FT8), no morse yet.

First I saw 3D2AJT active on 17 meter FT8. It's a special event callsign in memory of "Zorro" JH1AJT and I saw that Fiji Islands was a new country for me, so I made the contact.

I also saw the A8OK dxpedition to Liberia active and had a contact in FT8 on the 20 meter band. I was somewhat lucky as I saw them 'restart' the transmitters and I was able to jump on the first CQ. They were also active in morse on the 17 meter band but a lot more people wanted that contact and I didn't have the time to sit behind the radio for hours.

Update 2024-04-13

Added A8OK on the 17 meter band in FT8 where I was one of the few (???) stations responding. Adding them in morse was a lot harder! After a session of about 40 minutes sending my call on the 10 meter band in morse I finally got through.

Last weekend was the EA RTTY Contest as organized by the Spanish amateur radio club URE.

I participated Saturday evening, the rest of the weekend was filled with other things. I made 30 contacts and stayed on the 20 meter band, so I entered as a single band (20m) operator.

I got a few stations from the USA and Canada in the log, which can be somewhat remarkable at the current propagation, but these are probably big contest stations with enough power and good antennas. The very remarkable contact was my first RTTY contact with Australia!

The end result was 30 contacts including 12 unique Spanish provinces.

2024-05-07: log check results in

According to the log check report I have 1 'not in log' and 0 'wrong serial' errors, so 29 valid contacts, 57 qso points, 31 multipliers giving 1767 points. I have more multipliers than contacts because the first contact with Spain counts as 2 multipliers (one for the country and one for the province) and the first contacts with the US, Canada and Australia count as 2 multipliers (one for the country and one for the call-area number).

2024-05-13: Final results

Final results are in: EARTTY Results – Concursos URE. I rank #47 in the single operator 20 meter DX category.

The portable multiband vertical antenna based on Teleskop 1/4 Lambda Vertikal - Draussenfunker.de had been on the project heap for two months now. I did some tests on how to connect the radials but until recently I didn't have a working way to make the connection. Crimping connectors on 8 small wires at once did not make a solid connection.

My new idea was to use a distribution block (Dutch: kroonsteentje) to connect the wires. I tinned all the 31 wires. I found out that 8 wires wouldn't fit easily in a 1.5 mm2 opening so I redistributed them: from 3*8 + 1*7 to 4*6 + 1*7. That fit, and I connected all the wires on the other side of the distribution block together and to one wire to make an earth connection at the foot of the vertical antenna.

The original plan was to test the antenna in the back yard after I was done, but it started to rain. Later there was a break in the rain long enough to go outside with the antenna analyzer. I found out I could get a reasonable match on 20, 17 and 15 meter bands. It was harder to find reasonable match (SWR < 2.0) on the 12 and 10 meter bands. I originally planned to also try with the radio (the Yaesu FT857D) but it started to look dark again and I brought everything back in. And yes, it started raining again.

Progress on this project, this can be a nice antenna for /P activities. Or to add the 15 meter band at home for contests.

Another chance to get a new entity/country in my logs: the EI DX Group was in Lesotho.

Lesotho is a small country in the southern part of the African continent. It is completely surrounded by South Africa, but it has been an independent country since 1966. More information on the country of Lesotho can be found in Wikipedia.

I chased this dxpedition last Wednesday and it didn't happen in FT8. But it did happen in morse. What helped a lot was a remark I heard at the radio club from a very active DXer about their morse handling. I still learn new things in amateur radio!

I also got confirmation of this contact within 3 days via Logbook of The World, which I really did not expect. I will probably still request a QSL card and pay for it.

The statistics in entities worked/confirmed

I now have made contacts with 189 different amateur radio entities in total, with 177 confirmed. In morse I have made contacts with 117 different amateur radio entities of which 108 are confirmed.

Currently the Rockall group is in Grenada which is a part of the West Indies islands in the Carribian Sea. Entry on Grenada in Wikipedia. As I didn't have Grenada in my amateur radio logs yet I wanted to get it in the log, but the weeks of the DXpedition were also filled with lots of other things that didn't leave me much time. During the last days of the DXpedition I finally got around to sitting down and trying to work them. The first contact was 17 meter FT8 on Thursday evening and today (Saturday), officially the last day of the DXpedition I managed to get in the log on 12 meter CW, right on time.

I had already tried getting through on CW on Thursday and Friday evening, but the Americas are always the hard DX from my location because there is a lot of house between my antenna and that part of the world. And I recently learned that European DXers start with a 1 kiloHerz split on CW, and American DXers with a 2 kiloHertz split. Even though they are from Belgium they were mostly making contacts at 2 kiloHertz split and above.

While I was installing perlman as my new radio desktop the nanokeyer sent a question mark ? at me, which can only be caused by something on the computer sending characters over the serial interface. This reminded me of removing modemmanager to avoid conflicts with other serial devices.

This time I had already removed modemmanager so it was something different. I found out brltty is another program which probes serial ports.

I can fully support brltty wanting to autoconfigure stuff so a blind person doesn't need a seeing person to configure their computer first, but I don't like programs probing any serial port. So I also disabled and removed brltty and now the nanokeyer has no more question marks for me.

The proxmark3 manual has a dire warning in Modem Manager must be discarded:

ModemManager is a real threat that can lead to a bricked Proxmark3, read this very attentively.

and I thought the interaction between brltty and the Proxmark3 could have the same issue. But brltty seems to be looking for specific USB serial adapters (ch341 based).

If I read Bug #1990189 “brlttty claiming CH341 usbtty device blocking acce...” : Bugs : brltty package : Ubuntu correctly work is being done on making the udev rules for the brltty driver be more specific to the braille tty devices using this ch341 chip. In the interim: be careful.

Lately the 'radio workstation' thompson was having trouble with the load caused by decoding FT8. Or rather I couldn't do much else while wsjt-x was decoding signals, starting anything else cpu intensive would cause delays. And the old annoyance that I couldn't let the screensaver set the monitors to powerdown because it would make one monitor go away and appear again was still happening.

So time for something new. Or less old. A new PC would be complete overkill for what I do with it! I decided to go with a refurbished Lenovo small form factor PC. I just wanted faster CPU and I/O, enough display outputs to drive two monitors via digital connections and enough USB for connections to radio(s), morse keyer(s), keyboard and mouse.

I found a nearby computerstore specializing in refurbished PCs. I went with a Lenovo ThinkCentre M710s with 16 Gb memory and 256 Gb nvme storage. In a nice small case. The shop sold it with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. The seller asked what I wanted to do with it and when I said I wanted to 're-educate it with Linux' he smiled and did not go into standard things about Windows. The built-in video is an Intel HD Graphics 630.

Making the USB stick to do the installation took longer than the actual installation. Graphics worked fine out of the box on two screens. The assumption that the left DisplayPort output will default to the left screen worked fine in Linux, so no hard work to change the screen layout this time.

After the first installation came the installation of amateur radio software and tuning things to make it work my way. I used my notes of how to install cqrlog in Ubuntu 22.04 and how to set up linux USB for the Yaesu FT-991a.

When I changed some things in DNS I ran into weird caching by systemd-resolved and I decided to throw that out (I have a perfectly good resolver at home where I like to have more control and insight) like in disabling systemd-resolved on thompson. After that firefox couldn't connect to anything, it seems the firefox snap as produced by Ubuntu is configured to use the 127.0.0.53 resolver directly. As I had some other annoyances with the firefox snap I just threw it out and switched to the .deb version, using the notes in How to Install Firefox as DEB on Ubuntu (Not Snap). I'll get the updates from the Mozilla team. I also changed the 'default webbrowser' from /snap/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/firefox to have menus and opening links from other applications working again.

Data saved by cqrlog, fldigi and wsjt-x was simply copied over. Currently PyHamclock doesn't work. I had to change some things for python3 and it still throws errors which I can't fix at the moment.

The name perlman is now added to The machine names.

Last weekend was the EA PSK63 contest organized by the Spanish radio amateur club URE each year. I participated mostly Saturday evening and Sunday morning, Saturday during the day I had other amateurradio-related things to attend.

In total I made 89 contacts, 68 on the 20 meter band and 21 on the 40 meter band. I gave the 10 meter band a try several times but heard/saw no other stations and nobody responded to a 'cq eapsk test' call.

No spectacular DX, a number of familiair contest calls in the log. The first contact in this contest was with EA4BAS and I think I have that call in the log of all spanish contests I participate in.

Update 2024-04-16: Log check report

One invalid contact (wrong exchange). So 88 valid contacts, 150 qso points and 57 multipliers giving 8550 points. Spanish provinces, dxcc entities and US, Australia, Canada and Japan call areas count as multipliers in this contest.

Update 2024-04-24: Final results

Ranking #127 Single Operator Multiband DX.

Yesterday I was checking the Reverse Beacon Network for interesting callsigns calling CQ in morse and I saw TR8CA from Gabon, which is a new country for me in amateur radio.

I managed to make the short contact without having to try for hours so that added the country as 'worked'. The next thing is getting it confirmed and I saw the confirmation in Logbook of The World today.

The Reverse Beacon Network uses amateur radio stations all over the world that automatically decode morse signals on amateur bands and try to find CQ messages with valid callsigns. This data is then processed and available via the Reverse Beacon Network main webinterface and via other ways such as HamAlert. For 'chasing' morse stations the Reverse Beacon Network together with HamAlert are a great help.

After calling CQ in morse a few times in the CQ World-Wide DX Contest CW 2023 and calling CQ in morse a number of times more in the PACC contest 2024 I can now share how I do this in TLF Linux based contest logger.

I learned several things along the way, made mistakes and improved a bit, and I know where to improve even more.

The important part is to let the computer do most of the work and making sure the computer helps the operator in making the contacts. The operator can get in a flow of calling CQ and handling contact after contact.

So I use the macros in TLF and let TLF control the morse sending via the nanokeyer I built.

I tried to adapt the macros in TLF to be more like N1MM because that is what everybody uses, and if I sit behind a radio and computer at the club it will have N1MM active for contests. But TLF works easiest in 'Enter sends message' mode where the Enter key takes the 'logical next step' in the contest exchange and for this it automatically uses some of its own macros. From the documentation:

In CQ Mode:

• With the call input field empty, Enter sends the F12 message (Auto CQ).
• With characters in the call input field, Enter answers the calling station by sending the F3 message (RST) and moves the cursor to the exchange field.
• If the exchange field is empty, Enter repeats the F3 message (RST).
• After the exchange information received from the other station is entered, Enter sends the CQ_TU_MSG message if defined, or “TU” (CW mode) and your call otherwise. Afterwards it logs the QSO, and returns the cursor to the call input field to answer the next call.

In S&P mode:

• When the call input field is empty, Enter sends the S&P_CALL_MSG if defined, or your call otherwise.
• When the exchange field is empty, Enter sends the S&P_CALL_MSG if defined, or your call otherwise.
• When the call input field has been filled, Enter sends the S&P_CALL_MSG if defined, or your call otherwise. Afterwards it moves the cursor to the exchange field.
• Once the exchange has been received, Enter sends the S&P_TU_MSG if defined, otherwise it sends your call followed by the F3 message (RST). Afterwards it logs the QSO and re‐ turns the cursor to the call input field to answer the next call.

So macros F12 and F3 are 'reserved'. I used the following in the PACC:

F1=CQ PA TEST % %
F2=+5NN- UT
F3=@ +5NN- UT
F4=%
F5=@
F6=+5NN- UT
F7=@ SRI QSO B4 GL
F8=AGN
F9= ?
F10= QRZ?
F11= PSE K
F12=CQ PA TEST % %
#
CQ_TU_MSG=TU QRZ
S&P_CALL_MSG=%
S&P_TU_MSG=TU +5NN- UT
#

And yes I adjusted this very quickly after some minor disasters on my first attempts. There is one more nice feature for calling CQ:

? (Query)
In CW or DIGIMODE sends the partial call followed by “ ?”. In VOICE mode sends recorded message 5 (F5).

I used this several times to get just one call I heard partially to come back to me. And it also works to send QRL ? to check if a frequency is in use.

Score calculation

TLF has supported the PACC contest for a very long time both for Dutch and for DX stations, but I noticed the score calculation on the Dutch side doesn't match the (current) PACC rules. Those rules are somewhat complicated with call areas in certain countries adding extra multipliers and multipliers counting separately for CW and SSB in mixed mode. There is an option with newer versions TLF and newer versions python to have python plugins for score calculation, that should solve this problem completely.

Hearing CL? in morse

The first time I heard a station send CL? in morse I didn't get the meaning, but later it dawned on me: the question was for my call (macro F4) because someone found the exchanges without hearing my call, and I ended the previous exchange with 'QRZ' (the code for 'who is calling') without repeating my full call again. That station assumed (correctly) that I was an interesting station to work, they just needed my call to start the contact!