This weekend I entered another RTTY (radio teletype) contest, the BARTG Sprint. BARTG stands for British Amateur Radio Teledata Group. They sponsor three contests during the year. This one starts at 6 AM local time on Saturday and runs to 6 AM Sunday. I was on about nine hours and managed to put 325 contacts into the log representing 58 different countries. It was fun but somewhat exhausting.
For this contest, I put up my 15 meter Moxon beam and used the armstrong method to point it in the general direction of where I expected the contacts. In the morning it was pointed toward Europe, then in the afternoon toward South America (very little activity there) and in the early evening toward Japan. The rest of the time and on other bands, I used my verticals. This was the first contest that I did a fair bit of running. I’d search and pounce the band once and then move to an open frequency and run for a while. It worked pretty good.
I’m not entirely sure of my score. I used RUMped and selected the one BARTG contest that was available in the menu. Then I learned that it was set up for the BARTG HF RTTY contest rather than the Sprint. This meant that the score computed multipliers for DXCC separately on each band. The Sprint only counts multipliers once for the entire contest. At least I know I did 325 QSOs.
This experience is also pointing me more and more toward getting on Windows and setting up N1MM logger or more likely WriteLog as the latter appears to be better set up for RTTY contesting. I did make one significant move toward Windows in that I purchased a surplus Windows desktop computer. We’ll see what it’s like when it gets here — and what it will take to get it up to speed for ham radio and digital modes. Should be yet one more adventure ham radio.
