Number nine for me since 2001. The 2007 running was a drag. I was not prepared for the boredom in 2008 and assumed we hit rock bottom. But 2009 even topped that. Here's ON5ZO razor sharp but totally subjective analysis of how and why.

• First off: no propagation. Really, NO PROPAGATION. Ten meters? Nothing, just like it has been for a few years now. Fifteen meters? Nothing. I dragged everything that was S9+++ on 20m to 21MHz. Nothing worked. I accidentally worked 2 Italians on 15m but a few minutes later they were gone. "There's always 20m" would be a good adagio. Except: there wasn't 20m. I worked two JA's in the noise. One YB that I hardly copied. It took until late Sunday morning to be called by a UA0. USA on Saturday? Few and far between and those who did call, were weak. I don't know about 40/80 because I spent a little time there as possible.
• The lack of propagation is the root of all evil. This makes that you don't get through and not many people hear you and not many people find it worth to tune the bands then. You can't blame them but the absence of calls to work adds to the boredom in this contest. Since people don't participate on the higher bands, they don't bother to be on the lower bands. So it was hard to make some contacts there.
• Many other contest about. REF CW which is not really big either but it's CW. Any CW contest beats SSB. There was a lot of RTTY activity in what I believe was BARTG RTTY? But it seems that THE place to be was Top Band for the CQ WW 160m CW contest.

So why on earth did I torture myself? Because I am blinded by the greed for contest plaques. I won both 2007 and 2008 UBA SSB contests in the 12h HP class. I'm afraid this year's score isn't exactly plaque material but at least I have had a chance to win one in this contest. I'll never win a plaque from here in any other (serious DX) contest. So I gave it a shot. Would I have made more QSO on 160m this weekend? Surely and easily. Would I have had more fun? You bet! Would I have worked some new DXCC on 160m? Probably a handful. Would I stand a chance to win a plaque? None whatsoever. Plus I find it my moral duty for some reason to be active in the UBA SSB contest. Now if for some reason I miss the plaque which is perfectly possible, I'll reconsider the strategy for next year.

The good thing was working my young but long time ham friend ON4IT. He seems to be QRV again after being away too long. Thumbs up too for OQ4B = ON4BHQ who did a great job with 100W and a limited yet FB setup. Maybe the most amazing thing was that Friday's semi-storm died out over the night, WX was FB and that I set up the tower and antennas from 09.30 to 11.00 and everything worked great on the first try. I was all set about 3 hours before the start. A record! I was afraid the MFJ tuner would act up again but it didn't. In retrospect the dipole for 80m would have been a better choice. "Told you so" will be ON4BHQ's reply but I needed to see if the 160/80 MFJ-tuned thing still worked after the weather elements played with it.

Just like last year (link) it was self spot / cheerleading time again on the DX cluster. Some guys use their primary callsign to spot themselves with the second call. Like ON5ZO would spot OQ5M. Let's make a K1TTT like report?

OQ9E          7093.4 ON7IDX      UBA CONTEST CORR FREQ           1705 24-Jan-2009
OQ9E          7092.0 ON7IDX      UBA CONTEST                     1658 24-Jan-2009 

Especially painful if you spot yourself on the wrong QRG. Obviously the first spot didn't work. QRZ.COM says ON7IDX = OQ9E. But there's more:

ON5MA        14255.0 OT7G        CQ UBA CONTEST                  0820 25-Jan-2009
ON5MA        14188.0 OT7G        CQ UBA CONTEST                  0722 25-Jan-2009
ON5MA         3765.0 OT7G        UBA ONTEST                      0547 25-Jan-2009
ON5MA         3765.0 OT7G        CQ UBA CONTEST                  0453 25-Jan-2009
 

QRZ.COM says ON5MA = OT7G. I could go on like that. Mostly club stations being spotted by their members (too many to mention). I know that most of these spots are made in good faith. The average ON ham only gets out once a year (so to speak) and is not a trained contester. Not even an untrained contest op - just a casual ham. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that but I think this spotting thing is poor operating practice and pathetic behavior. Now I don't think any of those guys is waiting for a "know-it-all" going to tell them how to work a contest. If they were, I'd volunteer right away because I'd very much like to "teach my people how to contest". But given the low enthusiasm for "Radio Sports" a/k/a contesting in Belgium, I'll just take a rain check. I envy the USA where contestuniversity.com is big (and in the UK: link). I'd love to be a professor lecturing there!

Now on to a series of CW contests. Usually I can double the number of contacts in the same time compared to the SSB totals. Less other contests going on during the UBA CW then and most of all: except for the really big contests, a CW contest draws more crowd than phone events. Now if only propagation would improve - even the slightest rise in SFI will make a big change I think...

Here's an update on the K3's KRX3. It's still scattered around in different bags on the work bench, waiting to be assembled and installed into the rig. I am currently not in a building mood. I've worked on my ADIF project in stead. I soon figured out that last week's discovery (the VE3NEA CallPars DLL) does not really return accurate DXCC / prefix information in all cases. Bummer. The N1MM software with cty.dat is my benchmark. So in stead of assembling the sub-receiver, I started writing some code to parse cty.dat and get the DXCC info for a given callsign.

I spent or better: wasted quite some time this week doing this but I didn't make much progress. I learned a cool thing though (LINQ) although I just scratched the surface of that powerful technology. The problem as I see it is twofold. First: all the callsign/zone exceptions in cty.dat. That's the easy part. Second: how to derive the prefix for a callsign? Like MM0/ON5ZO/MM. Writing the code is easy - it's just a matter of playing with strings. The hard part is coming up with waterproof and airtight logic and routines that return the right prefix for every possible callsign and portable designator. I've been browsing and studying the N1MMLogger source code. Very educating yet I force myself not to do a simple ctrl+c / ctrl+v. Not that I don't copy but the code I get from there is always rewritten to use the .Net methods and functions. To tell the truth this cty.dat thing leads me away from my target which I might have already achieved, being a tool to edit ADIF logs and process them for GlobalQSL. I should step back and finish that code to optimize speed and straighten out some glitches in the GUI. There seems to be a market for this stuff among DX4WIN users (link).

In the news this week: Belgium's hospitals run out of beds and doctor's waiting rooms are flooded because of a flu epidemic. We seemed to stay out of reach for the virus but Thursday morning I woke up with a clogged nose, a sore throat and lead heavy limbs. And it didn't get better later on. Nice, especially with the UBA SSB contest this weekend. And of course after a nice calm, dry and cold period the WX turned into wet and windy to even stormy today and over the weekend. So I didn't prepare a single thing. I even considered bailing out and not entering this one. I just checked last year's rate sheet. 450 QSO in 12h with the best hour giving me 67 QSO and the next best 45. Go figure. So I'll probably arrange a minimal setup tomorrow with the tower only up 2/3 and possibly only a dipole for 80m. Here's what I wrote last year regarding the strong wind: "so I made a 80m inverted V dipole in a hurry on Saturday morning. Bottom line: I was ready setting up at 13.30 local, needed to take a shower and have lunch before 14.00 when the contest started." A repeat of last year's scenario is quite possible. I'm talking about the messy preparation. We'll see if we can get the same result (#1 12h HP). Leave the vertical and use the 80m dipole because of the wind and make it a close call to the starting shot. My original plan last week was to crank up the tower to the max and deploy the 40m vertical dipole which beats the 40m GP and use the 80/160m vertical to get on Top Band in the CQ 160m CW Contest at night. But if I do decide to get on tomorrow, it'll be a low key UBA SSB only party.

If there were a skull emoticon I'd be more than happy to use it in conjunction with the word Vista.

I was reading the latest issue of PileUp! Newsletter and it featured an article referring to VE3NEA's site. Apparently Alex has made a DLL available to parse callsigns. I was thinking of a way to parse the well known country files. I don't like this format. I think it's very unstructured. So I was thinking of a workaround when this CallPars.DLL stepped up on stage.

I could not run the provided VB6 test application under Windows Vista. So I made my own .Net code which is very easy and straightforward but I kept getting an error: "Failed --Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID ....". Yet another DLL / OCX issue under Vista.  *skull*  Searching and searching, unregistering and registering the DLL, all but leading to the solution. I found a lot of hits on Google but no hints to solve the problem. Until this link showed me the way. It turns out that you need to run the command prompt as administrator if you want to use RegSvr32 to register the DLL. *skull*

Yesterday I went to my club's New Year's meeting and picked up a box of incoming QSL cards. The box is big enough but I was afraid it'd be even bigger. Hot topics under discussion: the K3 transceiver which the club will be ordering for the ON7SA station and the poor propagation. Too bad we can't buy sun spots.

After the traditional last three weeks of residing in the shack during the last three weeks of December, comes the traditional "off time" in January. I try to do as many work for school in advance because next month it's ARRL DX CW, UBA DX CW, ARRL DX SSB etc etc. Then comes RDXC, WPX SSB etc etc. So the first QSO in 2009 will be made in the UBA DX SSB contest in the last weekend of this month.

Last Monday, the KRX3 arrived. That means my parcel travels from California to Brussels in under 48 hours. Then the online tracking stops while my box gathers dust in the Belgian customs' warehouse for over three weeks until it finally gets delivered. They charge 25 Euro for this sloppy service. UPS fixes this in the same 48 hours door-to-door but this box came via USPS who handed it over to the Belgian parcel service ABX. Striking: when a real commercial company (UPS, FedEx, DHL, DPD) delivers, there is no problem and you can follow the box on the Internet. With Belgian "government owned companies" à la ABX and TaxiPost... Slow service and a pain to get the parcel when you weren't at home at the time the van stopped by.

I need to clean up my working table to assemble the KRX3 unit and install it into the K3. I hope that project will go well and the K3 will be healthy after the operation. It's planned for the second half of this week.

Other than that, I've been writing code for my ADIF project (I refuse to buy a crappy DX4WIN update). Next week it's a New Year's meeting at my local club and I plan to pick up yet another 6 months of incoming QSL cards. That means I need to get the export for Global QSL right. My DX4WIN version does not export QSL manager info in the ADIF. Go figure. In stead of paying for this P.O.S. software, I wrote my own routines last year and I need to rewrite them now for .Net.

Speaking of old VB6 and .Net. I've had some troubles getting the old Visual Basic (non .Net) to load the N1MMLogger source code. I need to rewrite the module for the UBA Winter contest and there was a question to add another local contest. But there were several problems with registering a needed OCX under Vista and after solving this, there was a problem in the code too with this OCX. All is fixed now but once again it shows that Vista has problems you don't encounter under XP. And that the .Net technology and its programming tools are my preferred environment...

Now that 2009 is upon is, time for a quick look back to 2008, not really ON5ZO's year.

The table to the right shows the number of days I am active in a year. This simply counts the unique dates in the log. So one day may count only 1 QSO or several hundred. It's pretty obvious that my operating chair was occupied far less in 2008 compared to the record year 2007. One thing I learned is that you can't force yourself to be active so I have no targets for 2009. We'll see what gives.

The data above shows the breakdown by band. A quick look to 15m tells a lot about propagation. And although 40m was hot throughout 2008, the number of contacts is halved. Read: less contesting. The rise in the number of 160m contacts is only due to the fact that I made 120 QSO in the Stew Perry contest and made about 200 casual contacts in December with the new antenna where I only had the 160m antenna up during contests in the previous years. And apparently I made 11 QSO on 6m with the K3.

The last table doesn't tell anything different than that CW is my preferred 'modus operandi' and that I didn't do a lot of RTTY in 2008. A drop in SSB too, probably because I didn't do a lot in ARRL DX and WPX SSB, and a drop in the number of contacts in CQ WW SSB.

There seems to be a bug in the breakdown for the less popular modes. Oh well, I'll just rewrite this piece of software too to run under the .Net framework.