MT Express Sample Low Resolution Issue ... - Monitoring Times

the biggest signal coming out of your state, or you
are operating a particularly unique special event
station, you’re going to have to go looking for your
contacts.
Folks who come to the ham hobby by way of the
listening hobbies know a thing or two about systematically
running through a band. Combined with the
above mentioned listening skills, you can roam the
bands with ease, searching for specific signals or trolling
for contacts of opportunity. As I mentioned earlier,
I use contests as a way of finding new countries. I am
not going to want to spend a half hour shouting at a
station from a country I already have in the log. Come
to think of it, in many multiplier-based contests this
would be bad practice if you were going for a score
as well.
Likewise, I am not going to climb into a pileup
on a station that is only working Europeans at the moment.
What I will do, not unlike shortwave broadcast
bandscanning, is make note of what stations I am
hearing and on what frequencies. Unless folks are
getting QRMed or are bandhopping themselves, they
tend to stay put for a good while. After I have tuned
through the band, I may drop back to some of the
known quantities on my bandscan list.
❖ Propagation, Propagation,
Propagation
Atmospheric conditions ... you don’t have to
like them, but you can learn to live with them. The
most successful amateur radio operators, high or low
power, HF or VHF/UHF, have been folks who take
a bit of time to understand propagation. Learning to
put yourself in the path of signals coming from the
part of the planet you want to communicate with is the
key to success. Even beginning shortwave broadcast
listeners have a sense of why you can’t hear certain
signals at certain times of the day on certain frequencies.
Likewise, every scanner enthusiast in the history
of the hobby has been both blessed and cursed by
tropospheric ducts and E Skip.
Dedicated monitors already know about tuning
in to WWV to obtain the A & K indices in order to
know where to get the most bang for their listening
buck. The last time I took the time to check, I saw
more than half a dozen freeware programs available
for download on the Internet that help a user calculate
MUF and LUF to and from any two points on the
globe. Such tools have been the hot setup for radio
monitors ever since personal computers came into
common use. (Come to think of it, I can recall typing
in the BASIC program for MINMUF on my Timex
Sinclair back around 1980, oops, not a nostalgia
column, move along.)
Transferring this knowledge and skill to the
amateur radio world is as easy as pie, and you will,
more often than not, find yourself in the right place
at the right time to do all that listening and tuning I
talked about earlier.
❖ What Are You Waiting For?
So there you have it. Even if you have yet to
become a ham, by virtue of being an MT reader you
are probably more than half way to a lot more radio
fun. Have fun! I’ll be listening for you on the bottom
end of 40 meters.
UNCLE SKIP’S CONTEST CORNER
ARRL RTTY Roundup
Jan 8 1800 UTC - Jan 9 2400 UTC
North American QSO Party (CW)
Jan 6 1800 UTC - Jan 6 0600 UTC
Hunting Lions in the Air
Jan 15 0000 UTC - Jan 16 2400 UTC
MI QRP January Contest (CW)
Jan 15 1200UTC - Jan 16 2359 UTC
North American QSO Party (SSB)
Jan 15 1800 UTC – Jan 16 0600 UTC
CQ 160-Meter Contest (CW)
Jan 29 2200 UTC – Jan 30 1600 UTC
ARRL January VHF Sweepstakes
Jan 29 1900 UTC – Jan 31 0400 UTC
January 2005 MONITORING TIMES 61