HF Contesting can be dangerous |
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Social |
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Find another day for friends or relatives to visit your QTH: weekends are 52 in number every year, |
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Make sure XYL is able to miss you for 2 days without filing a divorce, by time you're a lonesome radio warrior, |
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Convince your neighbour to refrain from TV for some time, or to travel to where TVI does not exist, |
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Restrict vehicle access to your area: they can be noise generators, and a hazard for your antenna system, |
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Lock the dog, so he wont start playing with your newly fixed low beverages, |
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| Physical | |
Take the friday off: next hours will be busy ones, so give yourself time for rest and last checkings before it gets hot. |
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Also keep off normal human activities the day after: you wont be much productive that particular monday anyhow. |
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Food is serious matter to plan: cherry jam is not made for CW keyer paddles, and swallowing chili peas during a phone contest is not the best choice. Also orange juice proves to be ruining keyboards. |
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| Strategy | |
Single or Multi-op: A successful multi-op operation requires serious organization and strong motivation. If both are not met, then better go Single-op so you can only blame yourself when the dust has settled, |
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And we prove it here ! |
Multipliers: do not stick CQing on one frequency that someone will take from you anyhow. Ploughing the band every hour to harvest for multis is a bare minimum. |
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Aerials |
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Antennas will make the difference as ususal: no top ten score with a mere piece of wire as antenna. |
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F/B ratio will be of little importance in most locations: 2 x 3 el. often do better than 6 el. on a single boom. In fact you need to spread a strong signal around. |
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Low bands are often the weak point due to space restrictions: our best choice for 75 would be a four square. |
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Amplifiers |
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Dont save on cooling, and improve with addit cheap old generation computer fans. Remove amp cabinet covers. Always remember: strong signal does not mean WIDE signal. |
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3.500Z's or equivalent require particular care. Mind a blower breakdown that would melt your valves without notice. Always prefer a ceramic workhorse. |
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| Some of our scores | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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See you in contests, except in |
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Weightwatchers Winter Sprint, and all those asking for QTCs, operator's age, girlfriend's bonnet size, or pet's name. |
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Shack |
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| Last minute fixings never work: always test long in advance your last secret weapon. If not sure, just keep to your station usual configuration. | |
| Headsets are important that will not squeeze your head, heat your ears or boom mike give you a ducky audio, HyGain is HyDisaster in this respect! | |
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Mind audio collateral damages |
| Audio compression and DSP improve signals consistantly: again settings must be checked before the contest, as it will be too late by then to remedy a distorded signal. | |
| Do not use VOX: a footswitch proves to be the fatest on/off device, and memory (voice) keyer mandatory, | |
| Logging-DXspotting | |
| Paper logging belongs to the past: no need of a Pentium xxx to run it, but spend time checking for quiet CPU and screen: a lot of them display "birds" that you dont wish to hear those days. | |
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| Use hot keys and serial or parallel interface to control your radios or antennas: after 24 hours playing, your computer's memory may be faster than yours! | |
| Always set logging autosave function on, so that you dont end up with an empty contest log! This happened at TU2CI some years ago and justified for one time the paper logging in parallel. | |
