What use is an F-call?

In the past couple of years I've participated in several contests, and I know you might think that "contesting isn't your thing", but bear with me, I think you might be surprised.

As I said, I've participated in several contests. I basically turned up, either with my own radio, or that of a club station, plugged in the aerials, and started entering logging details. There was slightly more to it than that, but overall not really.

This week I've been preparing for a contest myself. I have to confess, it's a totally different animal. My preparations are about a third of the way, at least I hope they are, the contest is about a week away and I have learnt so much that I don't even know where to start. I might add, that most of the learning had nothing to do with contesting as such, more with the invisible logistics which until now had mostly taken care of by themselves, that is, someone other than me made it magically happen.

So what have I been up to?

Well, for starters I want to run two radios side-by-side because I've got two ears and lots of antennas and I happen to have two radios, so my first preparation is to set-up some switching box that will allow me to hit the PTT on one radio and talk, while still having the ability to switch to the other radio, without having to resort to either wearing two headsets, having two microphones, or having to plug-and un-plug along the way. I'm getting closer, I can hear both radios, still working on a short somewhere which is causing the PTT to unexpectedly be active, not something you really want - hi hi.

I've got access to a nice tri-bander, so that takes care of 10m and 15m. There's a folded dipole for 2m on site and a wide-band wire dipole for 40m, but I really also want to have 80m, and I'd like to use my collinear antenna on 2m and 70cm.

So I'm going on-site a week before the contest to build both the collinear mast and the 80m pyramid wire antenna and to test them in-situ.

I'll then need to figure out what I'm going to do about logging, one computer, or two, what software, how to back it up?

Then there's food, sleeping arrangements, since I'm unlikely to be able to do 24 hours straight, though I might surprise myself.

There's the contest rules to read, radios to program, print-outs to make and I'm sure I've missed some salient detail.

All I'm saying is that contesting as such is not just about the on-air activity.

So, perhaps you'll give contesting a go next time, if nothing than to test your ability to set-up your station in a different location.

One more thing. Thank you to all those amateurs who set-up a station for me in the past. I clearly didn't know the half of it.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB.