Foundations of Amateur Radio

Contesting is a fun way to learn about amateur radio. It tests your skill, your station, your patience and your ability to change approach at a moments notice. For those reasons alone it's an activity that I recommend you have a go at.

For me it's also about self-improvement. With each contest, can you make better use of your station, can you learn more about your radio, about bands, about conditions and ultimately become a better operator. I know that there are individuals who keep telling me that giving out signal reports of 5 and 9 isn't helpful, to them I say, try it in a contest setting and see what else you learn.

When you start out contesting you'll quickly come across two terms, technically three, that need some explanation. The terms are Run, Search and Pounce, though the last two come as a matched pair.

The essential bit of information is that when you're on a Run, or Running, you're calling CQ and responding to other stations. You essentially sit on a frequency for a bit, start calling CQ and hope that others hear you and start to gather around to make contact with you.

The other side of that is Search and Pounce, or searching on a band for a station you want to talk to and pouncing into a gap when you can.

The two methods are mirror images of each other, so one station is generally running whilst the stations calling in are searching and pouncing.

Doing this in a contest setting requires slightly, some might say subtle, differences.

Let's investigate a contest RTTY contact. I'll simulate it between myself, VK6FLAB and Matt, VK6QS. I'll add that this is done in text in a RTTY contest, rather than voice, and, this exact exchange didn't actually happen, but for different reasons which I'll get into shortly.

It goes a little like this.

My station transmits: CQ TEST VK6FLAB VK6FLAB CQ
Matt responds: VK6QS VK6QS VK6QS
I reply: VK6QS 599 010 010
Matt replies: 599 032 032
And I finish off with: TU CQ VK6FLAB

Now this is the ideal contact, nothing extraneous, no duplication, nothing about having to repeat yourself. Mind you, if you're getting picky, you might notice that we're both sending our exchange twice, in my case 010, Matt is sending 032. 

If you look closer you'll notice that all pertinent information is sent at least twice because it turns out that unlike a keyboard on a computer connected to a screen, what you type in RTTY might not actually get to the other end if you're using HF radio.

My three transmissions are the one where I call CQ, the one where I say Matt's callsign plus the exchange and the one where I say TU or Thank You, and move on. Those are the run calls.

Matt's calls consist of his callsign, and his exchange.

Note that Matt doesn't say my callsign, since I already know it and I'm running and he's searching and pouncing. He should already know who I am before he transmits. If he were to add my callsign, that would just slow things down. This is a way to keep things moving along.

In fldigi, I can program a function key that does each of those five calls. You click on a callsign, push the appropriate button and magically you're either running or pouncing. There's also a button for asking for a repeat, or "AGN?, AGN?" and one for making a log entry, which you can combine into the final thank you for running, but it's needed separately if you're pouncing.

I did say that this exchange didn't actually happen and you might well wonder why I shared it with you.

Simple. This is the bare-bones of what's required. Everything else is extra in case things break down. If there are multiple stations on the same frequency, or if your levels aren't quite right and the decoder is having a hissy fit, the human in the chain, you, need to do something manually. Very much like when you're dealing with a voice pile-up and there's this one station calling over the top of everyone else and drowning out whomever you actually want to talk to.

In a contest setting there's plenty of opportunity to do both running and pouncing and you should. If you're running on a dead band you won't know because you're getting old calling CQ, but if you're searching on that same band you'll figure out pretty quick that there's nothing happening.

Similarly, you might have a desirable callsign or location and find that running is more effective in making contacts than searching and pouncing.

Whatever mode of contesting you choose, make sure that you're flexible, since band conditions change from second to second and you will need to adapt to the winds of change. A lot like when you learn to sail and find out that you cannot just hold the helm in one spot for the entire time.

I will note that the ideal RTTY contact that I've outlined isn't universal. There's plenty of debate about the most effective way to go about things. I started with what I knew about making voice contacts, shamelessly copied the RTTY macros from another amateur and used them as a basis to learn what I needed and what I didn't, and because this was my first actual RTTY contest I watched several YouTube videos, rather than hear actual contesting stations on the air, which is something I recommend you do to get a feel for what's going on.

Contesting can be a way of life, or it can be just plain fun with learning thrown in.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB