Dipped My Toe Into CW Contesting

For a long while, N1MM seems to have been the standard for contest logging software. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think it may have been what the Twin Cities Repeater Club used for Field Day way back in the ’90s when I would participate at their Field Day event, the last full weekend (of rain) in June.

Last summer, I visited the Field Day operation of the Anoka County Amateur Radio Club, not because I’m a member, but because the park where they do Field Day is about a mile from my house.

Anyway – I have done ham radio contesting before. Not a lot. And I’ve sat in the 2nd chair at a CW station, wherein the primary CW operator calls out or writes down the callsign and exchange, and the other guy types into the logging software. Usually, this is a one-man thing, but at the TCRC Field Day, they had at least one older gentleman with a great ear and fist, but who did NOT like dealing with the computer.

It is also my recollection that sometimes someone at one of the computers would click the wrong thing, or something would go amiss, and “the expert” on the logging software would be called over to get things back to where they needed to be. While I don’t want to be that guy, I figured it’d be in my best interest to learn how N1MM is set up and run for a contest. Maybe for me, for operating Field Day solo at home. Maybe in case I’m operating at a club’s Field Day.

Florida QSO Party

It was mere coincidence, but then, there’s some contest running somewhere almost every weekend anyway. I spent hours getting N1MM and my FTDX3000…

…working with each other. And once all the menu items (both software and hardware) are properly aligned, and the cables go where they need to go, they work together very well indeed. Then I was all, “Now what?” So I looked to see if there was a contest going on or coming up for which I could practice the set-up-a-new-contest-log-in-this-database thing. Sure enough, at that moment the Florida QSO Party was a mere few hours into it. Funnily enough, that contest started probably right around the same time I began installing N1MM.

The setting up of a new contest log was among the easier things I’d done in N1MM. It was becoming clear why it’s so popular.

I Can’t Copy That Fast Yet

Many of these serious contesters do fast CW. Really fast. I’m working on learning Morse Code, and building up speed, but I’m a long way from being able to hear the other guy’s callsign at 30wpm and having any clue beyond the first letter. But N1MM cleverly works together with fldigi, which I’ve been using for quite a while to decode a variety of digital modes, and CW.

Here’s the thing: I can send my own callsign easily at 25wpm. And I can recognize my own callsign at 30wpm. And as it happens (and this is the part I had not expected)… you can operate in a contest in search-and-pounce mode without ever needing to send the other guy’s callsign. Here’s how it worked…

I’d listen to a guy calling CQ (he’s in “run mode”). He’ll send something like this…

CQ FQP W4ABC W4ABC

…and then he will pause, listening for responses. The other stations respond by merely sending their own callsign, like “N9XYZ”.

Then the guy running will send “N9XYZ W4ABC 5NN SEM”. That’s CW shorthand for 599 Seminole County, which is to say “You are easily readable on a 1-to-5 scale, your signal strength is full-quieting S9 units on the meter, and the quality of your tone is excellent on a 1-to-9 scale, as received here in Seminole County, FL.” That might all be a lie. He may have had some difficulty copying, the signal may not have moved his meter at all above the noise, and the tone might be rough or chirpy. Doesn’t matter. In a contest, all reports are 599. And since “N” is merely dah-dit while 9 is dah-dah-dah-dah-dit, they also abbreviate the “9” with “N”.

The guy who just got a report from the CQ-er replies something like “RRR TU 5NN IL IL”. That’s “Roger, thank you, you’re also 599 in Illinois.”

It closes off with the CQ-er with something like “TU W4ABC QRZ”.

Notice: the guy in Illinois never sent the W4 callsign, only his own, and a few other characters he could memorize, or send from software.

This is when it dawned on me… all I have to do is listen long enough to clearly decode the CQ-er sending his own callsign and 3-letter county abbreviation. Copy-n-paste (or just retype) those two bits into N1MM and now the whole conversation can be done with Function-key presses. I was nervous at first, but it actually went pretty easily. I made 7 CW contacts over the next hour.

Came back after a break, and band conditions had worsened. The only stations I could hear were ones I’d already worked, or were too fast or too weak for fldigi to decode. Meh, so be it.

I think I’ll do a few more of these contests, such that I can be ready to take a shot at maybe doing some CW during Field Day this coming June.

Dits and Dahs and Ants in my Pants

In the previous post, should you have been so unfortunate as to have read it, you saw that I had gotten a Bencher BY-2 Chrome Iambic Paddle set.

Very exciting.

…to a very niche market, of which I am a member.

Way back in the early days of my Ham Radio avocation, most of the guys I met in the hobby were a strange mix of filthy rich and cheap bastards. Spend a 4-digit fortune on a transceiver? No problem. High 3-digits on a tower? No problem. But then they’d turn right around and bitch about the cost of the coax cable to go up the tower, and the sacks of concrete to secure the base of the tower.

So it didn’t surprise me that they could afford a morse code key thingy-jobber that cost a couple hundred bucks. I could not afford such a thing.

Nor did it surprise me that the price was that high. It’s not like every ham is gonna buy one. Many will instead use some crusty military-surplus thing that barely works… and they’ll brag about how much money they saved. These guys are a really weird bunch. But anyway, my point is that Bencher couldn’t make any money off economy of scale because the market won’t all go buy it. Only a few of them will.

Anyway – I didn’t.

Until about a month ago, then suddenly I got ants in my pants while on eBay, and I bid on several different auctions of Iambic Paddle sets. The one I really wanted was a handmade-in-Germany thing. They’re legendary. I didn’t get it.

But I won TWO of the others – two different models from Bencher. Both were dusty, crusty, with tarnished contacts, and seriously out-of-alignment.

I got them both cleaned up and working beautifully. Now I’m keeping the cheaper, uglier, nastier of the two (better match for my personality), and selling the pretty, shiny one. Or trying to, anyway.

https://minneapolis.craigslist.org/ank/ele/d/circle-pines-bencher-by-2-iambic-paddle/6872496832.html

CW For The Aging Brain

I’ve been a Licenced Amateur Radio Operator since Spring of ’92, but in those early years, I was more into local VHF than the long-distance HF stuff (what non-hams call “Shortwave”). And even when I did dabble on HF, I had only studied Morse Code enough to pass the 5wpm requirement at that time. Mere months later the FCC dropped that requirement, but I digress. I may have had three or four QSOs (radio conversations) using CW (i.e. Continuous Wave, the mode used for Morse Code). That’s it.

Point being: I was never proficient at it, and seemingly forgot almost all I’d learned. It’s the same as any 2nd language – use it or lose it.

I was away from the hobby for almost 10 years, just getting back into it a bit over a year ago. Many things have changed a lot. Many other things have not. One of the surprises is that, amidst all the amazing new digital modes made possible by advanced computer-sound-card-based DSP, and despite there not having been a CW requirement for US licensure for over two decades, CW has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. On an average evening, I might tune around the HF bands and hear almost nobody talking to each other. But boy howdy, there seems to almost always be at least a few signals in the CW portion of the bands.

Well, so now I’m doing what some might say I should’ve done back in the ’90s – I’m re-learning Morse Code. Holy cats, it’s hard. Takes a lot of practice, patience, and persistence. On top of that, what little CW I did in the early days, I had done with a “Straight Key” like this one…

It’s basically a single switch. No matter how slowly or quickly you press the black disc down, or how long you hold it down, the transceiver will be transmitting continuously while the contacts are touching. On the one hand, it means if you’re not great at making your dits much shorter than your dahs, you’re difficult to copy at the other end. On the other hand, if you’re tapping along at 10wpm, and come to something you find a little trickier to send, you can just slow down.

But now I’m re-learning using my radio’s built-in electronic keyer, and a set of paddles like this…

This is for Iambic Keying. Hold the left paddle (closes the left switch contacts), and the radio sends dit dit dit dit dit… Hold the right paddle (right switch closes), and the radio sends dah dah dah dah dah… But squeeze them together and you get dah dit dah dit dah dit dah… which is where the term Iambic comes from.

No more problems with dits being too long, dahs being too short, or the spacing between dits and/or dahs being uneven due to having a “sloppy fist”. It is, however, a very different process, physically. Any muscle memory I might’ve had (and I had very little) from using a Straight Key is utterly worthless when using Iambic Paddles.

It’s also rather pointless to try to slow down mid-transmission. You can put more space between characters, and more space between words. But the spacing between dits and/or dahs are whatever the electronic keyer is configured for.

I’ve been practicing on this thing for, I dunno, 6 or 7 hours today. The only thing I can send reliably is my own callsign. I’m hoping by week’s end I’ll be able to send THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG. Once I can do that, I could say I just about know the alphabet; might have started to build some new muscle memory by then, too.

There’s quite a bit of other code to learn after that. Prosigns, punctuation, numerals, common abbreviations, stuff like that. It’s gonna be a while before I attempt this on the air. Uff-da.

Why do it? Isn’t it archaic and useless in this day and age? Yeah, pretty much. But learning a “new” skill which requires different parts of your brain, and accurately-timed physical coordination, has been demonstrated to improve the elasticity of the human brain at my age. Helps stave off dementia. Might keep me lucid enough to keep working into my 70s. Goodness knows I’ll never have enough money to retire, so I might as well do everything I can to keep my earning potential healthy.

The 90s In The 80s

…but only just barely, if I’m remembering correctly. I would guess it was about 1989. But first, some background.

Suburban Swedish Baptist

OK, so there’s Conservative, and then there’s Conservative Baptist, and a bit beyond that, there’s Swedish Baptist. Combine with that an upper-middle-class suburb, wherein my elementary school had one person of color my entire 7 grades there. Zero people of color (that I can recall) for my 3 grades of Junior High, and one classmate of color (same year as mine) for the 3 years of High School. Oh, and in my Senior year, to my knowledge, two people who were openly anything other than heterosexual.

Suffice it to say, by the time I was an “adult” I had very little information to go on about how people different-from-us did things. If ever there was a TV show which hinted at any of these subjects, I didn’t know about it, as we weren’t allowed to watch it. Nor were these ever the subject of conversation at home – we were too busy discussing the heresy of the Catholics (“…no man cometh unto the Father but by me.”, so the idea of confessing to a Priest was crazy) – or the Jews (who killed Jesus).

So, yeah, I didn’t know jack diddly about anything.

The Original “Gay”

Believe it or not, in some ultra-sheltered enclaves of the 1970s, if someone used the word “gay,” there was a better-than-even chance it was meant to describe a heterosexual person who was joyous, carefree, and filled with jocularity. In hindsight, that may not have been the actual case, but if I had made any sort of benefit-of-the-doubt assumption, nobody in my sphere of influence would correct me on it, in order to protect my innocence. I was, after all, the youngest of the family.

Where To Have A Drink

So I’m in my mid-20s, in the time of my life that I was about due to experiment with perhaps behaving differently than my parents or my childhood peers. I wasn’t about to visit bars anywhere near where I’d grown up, for fear that I’d be spotted by someone who knew me coming out of such a place, and word would get back to my family. If I’m going to set out to see how other people live, I’m going to do it far from my home suburb. And I’d heard about an infamous place downtown Minneapolis called “The Gay 90s.” By now, I was pretty sure what they meant by that, but the place had been around since the 1920s, so I assumed it had probably originally been an example of that older meaning of the word. Utter ignorance on my part, but then, that’s me.

Six Bars

The Gay 90s has 6 bars. Something for everybody, right? I took that to mean that although a couple of them might be where gay people hang out, there’s probably others which are more suited to your average bloke. And when I arrived, I found there were twice as many women cheering on some male dancers as there were men. This reinforced my ignorant assumption that it was a very carefree, very hetero place, which just happened to be non-judgmental toward a homosexual minority crowd. I really don’t know.

Exploring I went, then. From the 1st bar with male dancers, I moved on to a Disco-like room. Then up the stairs to yet another room, where I heard and saw someone singing a song I liked and knew well. Streisand, something like that. They were really good… I mean spot-on. I carried my beer over to the only open table I could see, right smack in the middle of the room, and sat down. All the other tables appeared to me to be regular couples. The lady who’d been performing just finished, accepted her applause and cheers, and went backstage.

Then another lady came out. Oh my word, what luck! It was Cher! I had no idea she’d be performing in this little corner of Minneapolis, but doggone it, it was Cher! It can’t be, right? No way. But then she began to sing, and sure as shit, it was actually her… there was no mistaking that voice. Absolutely incredible.

And just when I might’ve thought my luck couldn’t get any better, Cher starts to come down the stairs at the front of the stage to perform and mingle with the audience, believe it or not. Then she spotted the one table in the joint with a young dude with a full beard, sitting at a table by himself, absolutely transfixed by this overwhelming spectacle of chance and fortune. Me.

Like a jungle cat, Cher comes stalking my way, belting out one of her huge hits, staring me right in the eyes the whole time. Starstruck, and virtually paralyzed, my jaw likely agape in awe.

Oh sure, she had gestured to some other audience members along the way, but I didn’t expect that she would actually reach down and touch me. Beyond belief, but to my amazement, there she was, Cher, reaching toward my face with her slender, delicate, gloved hand. It was just about the precise moment that she took a fistful of my beard that – with the now changed angle of the follow-spot on her – I noticed how large her adam’s apple was, and a hint of razor stubble peeking out from her stage makeup. I put 2 and 2 together during the next split second as “she” was pulling my face forward and “she” thrust “her” crotch and smacked me right in the nose with it.

The room exploded with laughter, hoots, and whistles, as they were all in on the gag, so to speak. They’d all spotted the ignorant dufus (again, me) when he’d walked in and sat down in the first place, and had probably all muttered to each other, “Oh shit, this is gonna be rich.” For this is the moment that dufus would learn what a Female Impersonator show was all about.

There’s no question I turned several shades of red, which only added to the entertainment quality of the experience for everyone else. But it only took me a few moments to realize it was all meant in good fun – no malice whatsoever. There are people in my family, and others I knew, who took themselves way too seriously, and would have been mortified by the encounter, but luckily I was never much like that. For a straight guy, I was pretty gay about things… and we all had a good laugh about it.

I never went back to the ’90s, but I’ve always remembered that evening fondly.