Radiosport.. what's that?
Find something that a person enjoys and they can turn it into a sport. These days we even consider card games as a sport, one that others can watch on TV even.. There are niche sports for just about everything. One of my coworkers here is in to locksport (competitions involving lockpicking). Who would have thought?
The sport that I am into is one that few have heard of... radiosport. It is an amateur radio activity whose base concept is pretty simple: make as many contacts as you can on a set of frequencies within a given set of time. Give it a scoring structure and compete. Within the amateur radio community it is commonly known as "contesting".
There are many different contests with different rules in play and usually you can find some kind of contest every weekend of the year. However, there are about half a dozen through the year that are active enough where I'd want to take time away from the family and participate.
To give an example, a contest may run for a set period of 12 hours, where everyone starts and stops at the same time. Any contacts made outside of this set time do not count for points. Each contact is a point on your score, and each new geographical area (state, country) is a multiplier to your score. Some contests are geared towards working domestic states and provinces, while some contests are dedicated to only working countries outside of the US and Canada. Let's say in a domestic contest I make 100 contacts in 35 different states. My total score would be 3500. Since contacts benefit points for both ends of the exchange, it is in everyone's best interest to make them, so they are quick, brief, and made to count. When you hear someone on the air from a state that you haven't contacted yet it becomes urgent to contact that station so you get an extra multiplier. You get the hint.
Contesters compete against other contesters, against friends, as well as against themselves (beating previous year scores). In larger contests, you can work in a team where multiple people work on different frequencies at the same time, making different contacts simultaneously. Software is written that works across a network of logging computers to keep track of your logs together, prevent duplicate contacts, and give you a running tally of your score and any "unique" areas that may help your multiplier score. Some would say that "its kind of a big deal".
The contests can be dedicated to certain frequencies and vary across the whole spectrum of radio capabilities, but for most contests they operate on HF (High Frequency) radio signals. HF signals propagate in the atmosphere and through the ground, allowing them to travel short distances or around the world. But there is a catch: propagation is a very dynamic beast. Some frequencies work well in the day time when the atmosphere is ionized by the sun's rays, while some frequencies work better at night when that ionization is absent. Sun spots and flares can change the game drastically, for better or for worse. We haven't seen much of that this past year in the solar minimum we are in but hopefully that will change in the coming year and the Sun will become a bit more active. There is a bit of skill involved in getting radio waves to and from a given point. In the last contest I worked (an international contest), we capitalized on the change from day to night to send our signals along the "grayline". The grayline is that line between night and day, and can sometimes carry radio signals along with it from point A to B better than aiming a straight line from those 2 points. In this instance, we used the grayline to pick up a whole handful of contacts from Japan while the sun was just rising for them. Below is what this line looks like on a map.
You have varying station capabilities as well. Radios can run at different power, you can add signal amplification, and different types of antennas will propagate in different ways. No 2 stations that contact each other are going to have the exact same setup. Some antennas are omnidirectional while some can be aimed in a direction (see the image above of the antenna we have at the Indiana University club). My home antennas are made from some wire I picked up at Lowes, while other stations spend hundreds on an antenna. These all play a part in your capabilities, and give you something to improve on over time. Think of it as an athlete building on his game through practice.
I hope I've given you an idea that there is a bit of skill and experience involved in such a "sport". It is not just picking up a radio and talking. If you want a high score you have to know your stuff and build a well operating radio station. Some people build entire antenna farms devoted to operating in these contests, spending tens of thousands and pulling in a dozen team members to run a contest. Personally, I like to operate contests at home to see how well I've made my antennas, and I like to operate contests from the IU club (K9IU) for the strong capabilities of that station and the teamwork involved. There is always the thrill of the hunt when a contest comes around. How active will the airwaves be? Will the sun help us out or hinder us? It is a lot like sport fishing, and everyone is out there fishing for each other.
Interested? Find an amateur radio club near you via this link, or drop me a line. One of the most popular contest-like activities is Field Day, where contacts are made from temporary stations built outdoors all across the country (see pic above, one of the many stations we had set up in Karst Farm Park here in Bloomington). This happens the fourth full weekend in July, and most clubs welcome visitors to this event to see how things run. Visit this link for more info on Field Day, or check out the photo gallery from our participation in field day last year. I'll post some more links below.
(and no.. morse code is NOT required)
Cheers,
-Corey (KB9JHU)
http://www.radio-sport.net/ ham radio contest news
http://www.indiana.edu/~k9iu/?q=node/10 K9IU - Indiana University amateur radio club contest scores
http://www.hornucopia.com/contestcal/ Upcoming contest calendar
http://www.chrisellerphotography.com/ Chris Eller took the first picture in this post of the K9IU HF and 2m antennas.
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Comments
How hard is it to get started in that?
Amateur radio licenses are tiered.. the first level is called "Technician" and is not too tough. Any old med student can figure it out. ;) Seriously, we have Technician amateurs down here who are still in elementary school. A little bit of electronic theory, some basics of how radios work, and learning the FCC rules is all it takes. $14 to take an exam and if you pass you get a license.
This license grants access to mostly VHF/UHF frequencies, which tend to be metro-area like frequencies (you can talk on local repeaters which would cover Indy, and linked repeater systems which extend coverage to say, a third of Indiana).. Nowadays there are ways to link up repeaters around the world with VoIP which is cool as well but not used for contesting.
The real contesting comes in the HF frequencies (think shortwave) which require the next level of license, "General". The exam for this one is not too bad but there is a lot more radio and electronic theory involved. This is where I'm at now. One more level exists, "Extra" which gives access to small bits of the airwaves that are restricted to just Extra class amateurs. Its a bit crazy with math and more radio theory. General is perfect for me right now, and most contesting is done within General frequencies to accommodate those restrictions. No morse code requirement for any of the license classes now, though morse code is still quite popular on the air.
With a technician license you can operate contests with others who have a higher license, and they are the official "control operator". This is the best way to go, find a local group to tag along with for a contest and see how it works. It can be pretty fun and intense. I'd be happy to have you come down to Bloomington sometime when we operate a contest from the Indiana University radio room. I'll have to poke around and see what groups are closer to you up there.
To answer your question of "how hard?".. Its not that hard. As for how expensive, well there is a rabbit hole you jump down.. If you get hooked you'll never find how deep that hole goes. heh VHF/UHF radios (Technician, talk around town stuff) are around $150. HF radios will start around $700-1500. And then you have antennas and feedline. Like I said in the post, I make my own antennas so they are relatively cheap, and you can buy similar wire antennas just as cheap. But, if you wanted to start putting up towers and big beam antennas it goes up and up from there (like this guy, he's a big 'contester' who has a 6-station contest room in his place. They operate every contest and obviously score pretty well, but they often compete in a category specifically made for such a setup): http://www.k1ttt.net/overview.html
Books are available to teach each level, I'd recommend these: http://www.arrl.org/catalog/lm/
And FYI, the questions on the exam are all taken from a publicly available pool of questions. So you can study the questions for any that you may not know to ensure you pass, and there are also plenty of practice exam sites online to take tests at.
Drop me a note, I'm happy to field any follow-up ?s..
Just to wet your whistle.. In the last international contest we operated from IU a few weeks ago, we had 327 contacts in the 77 overseas entities listed here (an entity is usually a country but can include outlying islands as well. For contesting purposes, Hawaii is considered one): http://www.indiana.edu/~k9iu/?q=node/146#comment-58
Corey,
It's amazing how time flies and how small the world is! I didn't know you were still active. Since the Explorer Post I stopped working and learning, but now I am more settled I am re-learning the theory. I have a yaesu FT-897, an HF screwdriver on the truck, and a 2M/440 whip on the truck. It feels like it has been forever since I had learned the electronics and I am working on the General questions. We'll have to get together and chat sometime!
Talk to you later,
John
Hey John, good to hear from you! I had a couple years of inactivity myself when I was out west, just due to a lack of time more than anything. Did some high altitude balloon flights using APRS in Oregon, that was about it. It is nice to be back here in Indiana to a slower pace of life so I can fill the free time with hobbies.
you're in Indy right? I'm on the W9WIN system occasionally, they have a link up there in Indy: 444.325+, 136.5 PL. It is a linked repeater system covering most of central Indiana, see http://w9win.org I'm more often on the K9IU repeater down here in Bloomington, which we have on an IRLP reflector that we also run here, 9440, so if you have an IRLP node nearby give it a call. If you haven't caught up with all of that stuff yet its pretty cool, a lot has changed since the days of the post. (IRLP is linking repeaters up over the internet all over the world, you "dial" a repeater or reflector where multiple repeaters can connect like you would dial a phone or party line) The digital modes on HF are really fun as well. Gives a good techie spin on radio. Between all of that and contesting, its not all just old guys rag chewing. ;)
As for your General, check out this free study guide: http://kb6nu.com/2007GeneralStudyGuide.pdf In the meantime you still have a portion of 10m that you can work SSB as a Technician, but with the low sun cycle there hasn't been too much activity there. Also, read up on 6m SSB. 6m is an awesome band and really fun to work when it is open, but there is really no telling when that will happen. Conditions are generally better in the summer time for 6m, so the big VHF contest is usually held then (weekend of June 13), but when 6m "opens up" due to Sporadic E propagation it carries across the whole country. Not bad for VHF, and well within Technician abilities. A lot of people like this band as well because the antennas are smaller than for HF bands, so they can get a 3 element 6m beam up on a TV rotor and work the whole country on a good day. Like with 10m though, those days are hard to come by in this solar minimum. Most activity these days can be found on 20m and 40m during the day time, then 40m and 80m at night.
PropNet is an automated network of digital HF stations that beacon and report what beacons are picked up and relayed to a website that shows what bands are good in real time, check it out. I wrote more about it in a forum post here: http://www.indiana.edu/~k9iu/?q=node/121 Keep in mind though, the lack of activity on propnet does not necessarily indicate a dead band (20m and 40m are often real good and not shown), but rather any activity shown on propnet indicates good conditions for that band. This is good specifically for watching 6m and 10m.
So, whatever happened with the post? How's your dad doing?
Let me know if you need any help on studying the General!
Nice post Corey!
Only one correction though....Field Day weekend is in June, not July.
"This happens the fourth full weekend in July, and most clubs welcome visitors to this event to see how things run."
73'
Dean
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