Foundations of Amateur Radio

One of my favourite activities is contesting. Essentially it's a time-limited activation of your station for the purposes of testing your skill and station against other participants. Contests are controlled by rules as varied as the amateur community itself.

That said, there are common terms and concepts and if you're not familiar with them, they can lead to confusion and disappointment when you inadvertently break a rule and see your hard work vanish into thin air.

I will note that what I'm discussing here is not universally true, so read the rules for each contest you participate in, something you should already be doing since rules are refined over time and it's rare to keep the same rules between years.

A contest starts and stops at a specific time, often expressed in UTC, or Universal Coordinated Time. You should know what your local timezone is in relation to UTC and take into account any variations like Summer and Winter time. Any contacts made outside these times don't count and you cannot log these against the contest.

Each contact or QSO is awarded a set number of points. It might be scored based on mode, band, power, time and sometimes distance. To encourage specific types of contacts, some might attract a score of zero. This does not mean that the contact is useless, which I'll get to shortly.

Your score is the sum of all the points you make for each contact. I will mention that contest logging software can track this to make your life easier, although it comes at the price of requiring a computer.

Sometimes a prohibited contact attracts penalties. Prohibited, as-in, by the rules of that contest. For example, some allow you to contact the same station more than once, others allow this only if you do it on a different band.

Speaking of bands. It's not permitted to make contest contacts on the WARC bands. In 1979, the World Administrative Radio Conference allocated the 30m, 17m and 12m bands for amateur use. These are not used for contesting. To avoid a contest, you can use those bands, but truth be told, you should try to use all the bands, even during contests, since it will help you operate your station in adverse conditions, something worth practising.

Many contests allocate additional scoring based on state, country, DXCC entity, CQ or ITU zone, prefix, or all of these together.

Both the CQ and ITU zones represent regions of the world. The CQ zones are managed by CQ Magazine and the ITU zones are managed by the International Telecommunications Union. A zone is represented by a number.

The DXCC is a system that tracks individual countries across the globe. If you make contact with 100 of these places, you've achieved your DX Century and you join the DX Century Club, or DXCC.

Consider a contact with me. You'd have a contact with VK6FLAB. It would also be a contact with the VK6 prefix, the VK DXCC entity, CQ zone 29 and ITU zone 58. If that's not enough, it would also be a contact with OC-001, the IOTA or Islands On The Air designation for Australia.

This is useful because for some contests these extra features represent points, often significant ones, generally referred to as a "multiplier".

To calculate your score, tally up all your contact points, then count all the features, CQ Zones, the ITU Zones, DXCC entities, states, countries, etc. and multiply your score with that count. If you contact 10 callsigns and get one point for each, you have 10 points. If in doing so you contact five contest features, you end up with an overall score of 50 points.

Often contests have different categories and rules for transmitter power level, the number of transmitters and the number of operators.

Definitions for these vary. High Power might be 400 Watts in Australia, but 1500 Watts in the United States. QRP or very low power might be 10 Watts in one contest, but 5 in another, so check.

Some contests have an assisted category where you're permitted to use tools like the DX Cluster where other stations alert you online to their presence on a particular frequency.

There is a concept of an overlay, where how long you've held your license, your age, working portable, battery operated, using a wire antenna or mobile, groups you with others doing the same thing. This means that you could be a rookie, youth, portable, battery, wire antenna, single assisted operator, all at the same time. It often pays to consider who else is in a particular group and make your claims accordingly.

If you're contesting with more than one person, a Multi station, there are rules for that too. Sometimes this includes the amount of land a contest station is permitted to use.

If you're a Multi-Single station, you might be permitted to use one transmitted signal on one band during any 10 minute period.

A Multi-Two might be permitted to use two simultaneous transmitted signals, but they must be on two different bands.

A Multi-Multi may activate all six contest bands at the same time, but only use one transmitter per band.

Some contests have a Short Wave Listener or SWL category, where you log all stations heard. There is also the concept of a check-log, where you log all your contacts, submit them, but don't enter the contest itself. You might have worked stations during the contest, but not according to the rules, because you might be aiming to get your DXCC. Submitting your log will help the contest organisers check other entries and validate the scores of the stations you contacted.

This might all be daunting, but if you read the rules of a contest and you're not sure, every contest manager I've ever spoken to is more than happy to help you understand what's allowed and what isn't.

One tip. Contesting is as much about the rules that are written as it is about the rules that are not. If you find a gap in the rules, and it doesn't go against the spirit of the contest, you're absolutely encouraged to use that to your advantage. If you do, you'll quickly discover why the rules change so often.

Preparation is everything!

I'm Onno VKFLAB