15M & 20M at high noon at my QTH. It's like a CW Orgy! Eventually 40M came to life
Then 80M started hitting on all 8. Unfortunately I didn't get a screen shot of 80M. My goal for this contest was to simply increase band/country totals which I did. I set up spot collector in DXLab to filter bands
First 15 and 20. I had things setup to changing bands required no tuning and only 2 switch clicks. As 15 started to fade I added 40 to the mix and finally I added 80 and turned off 15 since it was pretty much dead. Spot collector has a color coded database display
The legend is down in the right corner and here in config
This is really cool if you are working a contest for band/countries and not points/mults. If you work a station for example W100AW (what's with these stupid callsigns?) on say 20 CW it will display in black. This is important since in a contest it will tell you if the station is already worked a.k.a. a dupe. If you then switch to 40 and W100AW is on 40 it will either display in red or blue. It will display in red of you need the band/country. It will display blue if you already have that country on that band. The yellow and pink background describes LOTW or EQSL participation. So once I had this all set up I just sat back and did other things while waiting for new red ones to emerge. Initially it was fast and furious but after about 8 hours the red ones had dwindled to a trickle, meaning I had worked most of the band/countries that appeared on 15, 20, 40, and 80. I missed a few. What was amazing was I was able to hear virtually every red station that popped up but I was not always able to make the return trip. Because they were on the bands for so long I was able to capitalize on propagation. This was especially true for all time new ones. If I couldn't crack them on 15 or 20 pretty soon they would show up on 40 and get bagged or some other combination. I increased my band/ country total by 30 on every band and my over all countries worked by 19.
Now all I have to do is figure out the band following issue so I can get my antenna switch and amp to automatically follow the radio. I had this working with the F5K but since I now run win 8.1 there are no drivers for the device I was using to communicate with the amp and ant. switch.
Finally I was pleased to see this
Steve K5FR added S meter and dBm reading, peak and avg for 2 slices. This is incredibly useful. He da Man!
73 W9OY
