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Contesting |
I enjoy operating in CW Contests, usually in the QRP section. This is an ideal way to improve CW and listening skills. It's also very good for testing antennas, because if many stations come back after just one call, you can be sure the antenna is radiating well. It is easy to have fun and post a reasonable score in many of the European contests with just modest power and antennas. The big contests like CQWW are much more of a challenge as the bands are very busy with many large signals.
My favourite contests are the REF Contest, Worked All Germany, DARC Xmas Contest, AGCW Happy New Year Contest and IARU Contest. I also enjoy participating in the smaller contests and activities run by the various CW clubs of which I enjoy membership.
Having a small signal usually means one can't often hold a frequency and run with CQs, so the Search and Pounce method of working stations is usually used to build a score. To work S&P effectively, it is necessary to use a decent logging program to avoid wasting time hearing the same stations over and over again. The current program used at G3VGR is N1MM's Logger, which is a dedicated Windows contest program. With it's excellent bandmap facilities, it is a very suited to S&P operation. It also has the advantage of being freeware. I have also used YPLog for contesting, which is also rather good, having the unique ability to create rule files for various contests that are not supported by any other logging programs. Unfortunately, support for this fine program ceased a long time ago.
Many of the best contest programs run under DOS, such as CT, NA and SD, however my favourite is TR. Unfortunately, it is a pain to retain a dual-boot PC just to provide the ability to occasionally run DOS-based contest software and many of the newer systems do not have floppy drives included. I've resolved these issues by using a dos-bootable USB flash drive. Hewlett Packard have a utility to system format the flash drive. I can now run TR on my Corporate Dell Laptop which has no floppy and only Windows XP installed.
 YPLog Screenshot |
TRLog Screenshot |  N1MM Logger Screenshot |