Got on the air this weekend for the BARTG Spring RTTY Contest. Managed to get in just over seven hours spread over Friday evening, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon. Got the Moxon up in the air and it served well getting my 100 watt signal into Europe. Even so, most of my QSO’s were in the USA.
N1MM and MMTTY worked excellently throughout the contest. Plus, the setup in N1MM was very easy considering that the contest requires serial number and the UTC time. Had a couple of bobbles with the click to copy the exchange. Also had a few where an S & P message would send AGN? rather than repeat the call. I got used to this version of Enter Send Message in RUMped. I either need to re-learn my habits, or look into setting up the macros in N1MM to duplicate that approach.
In those seven hours I managed to contact 152 stations, mostly on 15, 20, and 40. 35 DXCC countries, 35 areas, and 4 continents — no Asia or Australia.
The rest of the weekend was consumed with a few family and housekeeping matters. Had a new cable/internet/phone service installed on Thursday. So had a few issues figuring that out. Also had to do some repair work to the lawn sprinkler system that occurred as a result of the cable installation. Finally, my daughter Brooke returned home after presenting a paper at a conference and her MacBook promptly packed up its hard drive. That computer is now toast and so is her paper that she worked on during the conference. Gee whiz.
Good to get on the air. This was my first BARTG Spring contest. Not the same level of activity as the CQ WPX RTTY earlier this year. Can’t wait for the CQ WW RTTY — that should be interesting.
