Here are some more pictures from CQWW DX CW 2009.
Monthly Archives: December 2009 - Page 2
More pictures from CQWW CW
Posted by sm2wmv
on December 13, 2009
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openASC software progress
Posted by sm2wmv
on December 3, 2009
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Now when the winter season has started there is more time to do work on the electronics which will be installed at the station. A system I have been working on is my openASC system which stands for open source Antenna System Controller. It will be used to control the whole station and enables us to have extreme flexibility from each operating positions, to have access to all different antennas and rotators. It also gives us the possibility to control everything over the Internet.
I have ordered parts to build the complete system and while waiting for that I have been working a bit on the configuration software which is cross-platform Linux/Windows. It is written in C++ with QT4 as graphical platform. I first wrote the software in Java but got tired of it and decided to rewrite the whole thing in C++, which also made me rethink some of the ways I had implemented stuff.
When starting the openASC box and pressing a certain button it enters setup mode. Now we can connect to it from the configuration software and change all the different settings in the box. Some examples are shown in the screen shots below. Enjoy!
CQWW CW result
Posted by sm2wmv
on December 2, 2009
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Another contest over and we feel pretty pleased with the result. The propagation’s were not the best since the bands seemed slow to recover from the aurora on Friday morning. However they improved the longer the weekend went on and on Sunday the signals from NA were pretty good on at least 80m and decent on 160m. We are very happy about the 160m/80m result which are also the bands we have pretty much “completed” antenna systems which will only have some small improvements towards to the final design ideas at the station. 40m was for sure our weak point and with the kind of propagation’s now this SHOULD be our money band but it wasn’t, because of just using the 1/4 vertical. 20m was a huge disappointment. We have been listening on 20m for weeks with great openings in the evenings towards W6/W7 and sometimes even east coast openings but this time the bands closed rather early and they didn’t open up as well as they can do. However we had a fun opening to run a few west coast guys on 15m during Sunday evening just prior to the contest end, that was a blast.
Compared to the SSB part we had a point average on 20m which was around 2.3 pts/q, now we had around 1.7 pts/q so it’s a quite big difference. However we are happy about the multiplier total (considering 40m) and the number of qsos worked is also all OK. Next year we should imrpove this result A LOT when we have a more flexible station because we really need at least one good independent rotatable yagi on each band, making us able to work multipliers without affecting the run station.
We had the following setup:
Radios
RUN: FT2000 + Granger (1kW amp)
Mult: IC-7400 + ACOM1000
160m: FT1000D + 4-1000A
Antennas
160m: 37m high vert
80m: 4-SQ
40m: vertical
20m: 6el @55m + 3el @19m
15m: 6el @14m
10m: 6/6el @16/11m
I forgot my camera at the contest QTH so I don’t have any pictures to post right now. But I post some as soon as I get hold of them.
CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW Call: SJ2W Operator(s): SE2T SM2LIY SM2WMV SM3JLA Station: SJ2W Class: M/S HP QTH: Da Traesk Operating Time (hrs): 48 Summary: Band QSOs Zones Countries ------------------------------ 160: 720 24 82 80: 899 31 111 40: 443 31 98 20: 1014 35 118 15: 170 27 79 10: 6 5 6 ------------------------------ Total: 3252 153 494 Total Score = 3,469,666 Club: Worldwide Young Contesters Comments: