KDMG

WELCOME VISITOR NUMBER Hit Counter by Digits

Free Hit Counter

Home

Contest News

 

NZ Local Time

UTC Time

                        

                 WELCOME TO THE KIWI DIGITAL MODES GROUP

"2011  RTTY  CONTEST  UPDATE  PLEASE  NOTE"

The email address for submitting logs for this years RTTY Contests on April 23rd & 30th has changed. Please submit electronic logs to the following address: [email protected] any logs sent to the old zl2sky address will not be received.

The latest updated contest rules and guidelines have been added to the downloadable MS-Word & PDF files available on the "Contest News Page"

73 de Allan Chandler ZL2SKY.

 

The KDMG is dedicated to the various digital transmission modes that are used by amateur radio operators. I started this group on the 3rd of November 2008 with the premise being on having somewhere for those who are new to amateur digital communications to be able to obtain help with setting their digital station up. This group is hosted on the Yahoo Groups website and is open to all amateurs, be they in New Zealand, or anywhere else in the world. If you are interested in joining the KDMG then please click on this link KDMG once their, register yourself and you will be approved by one of the moderators in no time at all.

A Digital Modes Users Net is held on Thursday nights on 80 Metres on or about 3635 KHz from 8.30 PM New Zealand Time. The net is run on SSB phone for stations to check in and for discussion on the various digital modes. Pete Moore ZL2AUB normally runs this net and can also be found lurking around this frequency most nights from 7 to 7.30pm local time to assist anyone who might like to try some digital mode experiments. The Net will switch between phone and digital for those wishing to experiment with these modes. Everyone is welcome to join in with the net, and the more the merrier.

In the year 2009 I decided to look at what digital contests were available within New Zealand and was surprised to find that there were no contests organized from within New Zealand that were solely for the purposes of digital users. With this in mind I put out some feelers on the KDMG newsgroup along with a couple of other newsgroups that I belong to as a way to try and gauge what interest there would be in running a digital modes contest.  The outcome of this was the first running of the KDMG RTTY Sprint Contest which was run on two consecutive Saturdays in April.

One Saturday the contest was run on 40M and 80M was used on the other Saturday. The contest consisted of a one hour sprint and was open to all licensed amateurs from both ZL (New Zealand) & VK (Australia). There were three different categories which one could choose from to enter. They were 40M only, 80M only and a Combined 40M/80M category. Certificates were issued to the top three amateurs from both ZL & VK in the 40M & 80M only categories, and to the top three stations overall regardless of country in the Combined category.

With the relatively small number of amateurs in ZL & VK, and along with digital modes being a somewhat small interest aspect of amateur radio, over twenty logs were received for the contest, therefore I considered it to be a successful event. A similar contest was run in December 2009 and used the formula of a half hour of PSK-31 and a half hour of RTTY. This contest was not supported as well as the April contest, but this could be due to a clash with the New Zealand VHF Field Day weekend. I will be looking at re-scheduling this contest in the future on a different date to avoid this clash.