I had great fun over the weekend working the ARRL RTTY Roundup. I ran this contest in 2013 for my first major RTTY contest. At that time I was running RumLog on a Mac. I have now replaced the Mac in the Shack, if you will, with a desktop Windows machine I’d picked up for $10 via a corporate surplus program. I’m now running N1MM, MMTTY, and 2Tone. They work great.
For this contest I elected to run with just my standard verticals — Cushcraft MA6V for 20-15-10 meters and Butternut HF2V for 80-40 meters. They did a great job with signals coming in from nearly 360 degrees. I managed to stay in the chair for just 17.5 hours out of the allowed 24 hours. Had 555 QSOs, 52 states/provinces, and 35 countries. Total score came in at 48,285. This exceeded my effort last year by quite a bit. Next year it is more time in the chair and I hope I’m able to put a 20-15-10 meter beam in the air.
I also ran some SO2V operation during this contest. I set up the Elecraft K3’s 2nd receiver as the CQ station and used the 1st receiver and the P3 panadapter for search and pounce operation. This worked out quite well and allowed me to pick up a few extra QSOs on the run station, including a multiplier that I never once saw in my assisted operation.
I hope you were able to get on the air and have some fun this weekend. I’m looking forward to my next RTTY contest which should be the BARTG Sprint at the end of this month.
Wow Jim, excellent score! The SO2V really payed off in your advantage. Maybe you could film a little during BARTG? I would love to see how you operate SO2V…
73, Jim
Hi Jim, doing a video would be interesting. One of the projects on my “to-do” list is to generate a new video that covers my ham shack. It would be good to add some footage during a RTTY contest. Let’s see what I come up with. Thanks for reading my posts.
73, Jim, K5ND