The 82nd Commonwealth Contest (BERU) was held from 10am on Saturday 9th March to 10 am on Sunday 10th March. As the title suggests, this is a long standing contest and in continues in the tradition of CW (Morse code) only. As a relative newcomer to the amateur radio contest scene, for me this was another very enjoyable contest. Once again I had the honour of being a designated ‘HQ’ station with the RSGB Contest Club callsign GI6XX. I had a total of 325 QSOs this year as opposed to 211 last year – partly due to longer hours on the key and a bit more S&P (Search & Pounce) with SO2V (Single Operator 2 VFOs) on anything that showed up on my local skimmers.
We use the term ‘Running’ when we sit on a frequency and put out calls in the expectation that people will find us and call us. We talk about S&P when we tune across the band of use other aids to find running stations and call them. The ‘Search and Pounce’ terminology probably aptly conveys the tenacity with which we do this!
SO2V describes how we can have two receivers and use one as our main running station listening with one ear while searching for running stations at the same time with the other receiver and ear. Yes – it can be done – I’m working on it.
The contest covered all bands from 80m to 10m but current propagation conditions reflected our solar minimum and I only succeeded in having contacts on 80m, 40m and 20m. I spent a while on both Saturday and Sunday mornings putting out calls on 15m but even the Reverse Beacon Network didn’t see me. I did hear G6XX for a brief moment on 15m, possibly a short burst of Es (Sporadic E), and a very weak station in Cyprus, who didn’t respond to my repeated calls. I checked 10m a few times too but nothing ever showed up on my spectrum display.
Despite thorough testing of everything in the couple of days leading up to BERU, my WinKeyer unit (allows a PC to send CW in conjunction with macros in the logging program) assigned to the N1MM+ logging program on my PC would not function and I wasn’t keen to restart my PC at that point when everything else was working. Fortunately I was able to swap the COM port configuration to the WinKeyer I use on a day to day basis with the Logger32 logging program. But I was somewhat stressed by the time I had my first QSO at 10:04 – four minutes into the contest.
I couldn’t remember whether or not I was allowed to work the other ‘6XX’ HQ stations or not but that was confirmed when G6XX called me at 10:27. It took me a second or two to understand the unexpected message the N1MM+ logger then threw up saying “Another HQ in my CCA? The program detected the above error. It should be fixed before submitting your log or it may be rejected by the contact sponsors…Do you want to log this invalid QSO anyway?”. The simple answer was “Yes” and I then knew to watch out for that message subsequently – just a little bit unnerving at the time though.
After an initial gentle ‘rush’ of QSOs on 20m, things became fairly quiet. Around 11:00 I tried 40m and picked up another few QSOs in about 20 minutes and I returned to 20m where I was expecting to find more activity. The path to VE (Canada) on 20m opened for me around 11:30 and I stayed mainly on 20m until after 16:30. I worked two VKs (Australia) on 20m around lunchtime, the peak time of day for short path. I could see from the cluster that there were more VK stations around but I’m afraid that was all I could expect from a cobweb antenna not much above roof height. I’m in the process of regrouping after a planning application and appeal failed so I have not given up hope for something better in the future.
There was a steady trickle of QSOs throughout the afternoon and I moved to 40m again around 16:45 as I could see the activity level rising. The QSO rate wasn’t great but I got eight VK stations over the next hour – some while running and some S&P. This was a key time to be on the air in the hope of ‘grey line’ enhancement of the radio path and I wasn’t disappointed. I popped down to 80m at 17:45 while waiting to be called for dinner and logged a few UK stations there too.
Play resumed about 19:30 on 40m with my final VK of the contest at 19:36. The rest of the evening was spent mainly between 80m and 40m with the occasional check on 20m during the earlier part just in case there was anything there. There was a steady trickle of QSOs throughout the evening, more so on 80m than 40m. I finally stopped for a break at 22:00. I was hoping that later on there would be more from Canada on 80m and 40m as night started to fall there.
My late evening session started at 23:00 and, as expected, there was the odd Canadian station in amongst the UK ones on both 80m and 40m. While I wasn’t in it for the points on this occasion it was nice to see 25 points clocking up for a VE station as opposed to 5 points for a G one – but I love you all.
I didn’t have a particular finish time in mind as I didn’t know how activity would pan out but by midnight I was flagging a bit. At 00:28, after putting out a CQ, somebody started sending ‘GI…’. Normally when this happens my assumption is that somebody is starting with sending my callsign (which I already know of course) so my brain goes into neutral while they get onto their own callsign, which I don’t know but would like to. Even when they sent the number four nothing stirred. Finally something went click and I realised that they were not sending GI6XX or GI4DOH. Fortunately I had enough recall to realise that the last two letters had been ‘UE’ and it had to be the one and only Charlie GI4FUE (read that whatever way you like) who is virtually line of sight from the shack window. Brief pleasantries were exchanged and QSO number 287 was in the bag.
That rude awakening stirred the adrenalin enough to keep me going for another while but after about 25 minutes without a QSO, and with 290 QSOs in the log, I pulled the big switch around 01:00 – tired but happy. Sometimes it takes a while to get to sleep after a lengthy day on the radio but no problem tonight. Just not as long a sleep as I would have liked.
Business reopened with a QSO with 5B4AHJ (Cyprus) on 40m at 04:45. There wasn’t a lot else around so I moved to 80m where there was a bit more activity. I had a QSO with ZF2CA (Cayman Islands) at 05:01 and foolishly agreed to QSY (change frequency) to 40m without waiting to establish what specific frequency we should meet on. Fortunately my skimmer spotted him immediately and the QSO on 40m was quickly completed.
The rest of the morning was somewhat slow. I did check other people’s spots on the cluster on 15m several times but to no avail. I pottered about between 80m, 40m and 20m picking up anything I heard and waiting long enough to be found when I started running on a band. After working nothing for over 30 minutes I stopped for a break at 08:00.
Suitably refreshed and ready for the final assault I got stuck in again at 09:00 on 20m. Despite monitoring all bands I only had 7 QSOs in the final hour with G3WRR being my last QSO at 09:56 on 40m.
My final results were:
80m 146 QSOs
40m 84 QSOs
20m 90 QSOs
This amounted to a ‘claimed’ score of 3,400 but that didn’t really mean a lot to me – I worked anything I could and wasn’t trying to divide my time between getting the QSO numbers up and trying to get multipliers.
There were also five duplicates giving a total of 325 QSOs. Regarding repeat or duplicate calls, it seems easier to just work them again straight away rather than sending them the standard message ‘B4’ and arguing the toss. I’m sure there were good reasons for the duplicate calls and I have done it before myself many times. No logging program is going to flag a call with an incorrect letter or digit as a dupe although some will give you a prompt that you have already logged something similar.
Overall I was reasonably happy with my performance. It was hard work at times with a lot of signals down in the noise and the QSB (fading). I settled in fairly quickly after the panic at the start but my concentration flagged many times as you would expect. BERU does have the advantage of starting at 10am – relatively soon after a good night’s sleep. With contests like of NFD (National Field Day) where you have set up the station that day or the contests that start at midnight on a Friday, you tend to be knackered even before you start. Having a reasonable break for dinner on the Saturday evening and then breaks mid evening and Sunday morning seemed to work for me with the limited amount of sleep overnight.
I made a point each time I changed band of staying on the band until the Reverse Beacon Network had reported me a few times – just in case anyone was checking. I also occasionally put out ‘CQ GI6XX GI6XX BERU TEST’ just to give the skimmers an opportunity with the key words ‘CQ’ and ‘TEST’. My own local skimmer was decoding plenty of callsigns but not necessarily reporting them – I assume that is because it was not seeing those key words. I would be interested to hear other views on the subject.
Another tactic is that I tend to stay on a band for at least 10 minutes after somebody kindly spots me on the cluster just in case people pick up on it. Funny enough, while that tended to bring a torrent of callers during the FIFA activity last year when I was also operating at times as GI6XX, it didn’t appear to make much difference during BERU – quiet stayed quiet.
On the aerial front, the current setup is the best I can do while the local planning department has their eye on me as I mentioned earlier. The cobweb antenna may lack the advantage of directional gain but then I don’t have to worry about what direction I should be pointing it. My Butternut HF2V vertical with top loading has a remote ATU (Aerial Tuning Unit) at the base and that helps with the limited bandwidth on 80m (and 160m). I have a lot of radial wires buried in the garden but by necessity they are all somewhat shorter than ideal. My Wellbrook loop antenna provides a second input for diversity reception with my second receiver (listening on one receiver/aerial in one ear and another receiver/aerial in the other). The fact that the loop is vertically polarised while the cobweb is horizontally polarised is often helpful in that I can hear the signal moving from one ear to the other as the polarisation changes in certain fading conditions. It can also give a spatial effect when multiple stations are calling from different directions and help me catch specific calls. The current configuration is the best I can do while the planning department has their eye on me.
My Elecraft K3 transceiver does sterling service for CW with 250Hz and 400Hz filters in both the main and sub receivers. Interference from strong stations close to my tuned frequency is minimised by these filter and other K3 attributes although that wasn’t likely to be a problem in this contest. For the difficult weak signals, I find that the K3 audio peak filter gives an extra bit of resolution. It is a very sharp peak but I have custom waterfall displays showing me 300Hz to 900Hz on both receivers and I can tune quickly and accurately onto the signal with the RIT (Receiver Incremental Tuning) control. I can also see visually if the sub receiver is adding any value to the signal and switch it out if it isn’t. Every little helps but there are always some that get away.
The KPA500 amplifier and KAT500 ATU integrate nicely with the K3 transceiver and band changing is a doddle. I like the seamless solid state full break-in feature (allowing me to listen between dots and dashes) and the ability to immediately stop transmitting if I hear something. It also means that I can tune into a station on the sub receiver even while I am transmitting. I can run a power of 400 watts at the feed point of whatever antenna is selected as per our license conditions.
I use a 9A5N solid state paddle key so I never need to clean contacts in the middle of something – it’s only my fingers that let me down at times. While a certain amount of sending is done by macros on the PC, you have to be on the ball if you get out of sequence with the logging program or you need to ask for or send a repeat report. If you only get part of a callsign it is much easier to send what you have with a question mark manually. But it’s horses for courses – some people don’t use a Morse key at all and some people don’t use macros on a PC at all – I like to keep my options open.
In addition to manually tuning across a band to look for stations to work we now have technology available to help us. Skimmer software can look at a CW signal and ‘skim’ the information in the form of callsign, frequency, strength and speed. The popular CW Skimmer program can look at a band of frequencies and pick off a number of CW stations simultaneously. This can be output in a standard format and displayed in a manner set by user defined formatting and filtering. This can be combined with online networks that can stream incoming data that has been supplied either automatically by skimmers or manually – most logging programs give you a function that allows you to report a contact to others. Some use that facility to excess but you can filter out individuals if you want to.
Skimmers can be fairly narrow band, as in simply taking the audio from a rig, or being broad banded where they can cover entire amateur bands. This often entails using some form of SDR (Software Defined Radio) and in some cases multiple bands can be skimmed simultaneously. The collected data can be shared automatically, the Reverse Beacon Network is a prime example. This amassed data can be viewed through a variety of user defined filters.
Logging software can compare incoming spots and go to great lengths in flagging unworked stations or those that count as multipliers. They can display them in a variety of ways such as scrolling tables or bandmaps. You can configure things such that clicking on a spot puts you on that frequency and your software can even put the callsign in the appropriate entry box on your logger. It’s all very clever although it can be a challenge to set up in the first place.
While use of skimmers is contentious for some, most contests these days tend to have categories for assisted or unassisted. Like FT8, sometimes I use it and sometimes I don’t. I certainly don’t have to but it is nice to have the option. I do miss my panadapter on NFD though.
A panadapter in the context of amateur radio is where you take a section of the band and display it in the form of a spectrum display or waterfall display or both. Some more modern rigs include such a display on the front panel and typical SDR software has spectrum and waterfall displays built in.
On the skimmer and panadapter front here, I take the IF (Intermediate Frequency) from my K3 via a G4HUP (SK) buffer amp into a FUNcube Dongle Pro+ SDR receiver and feed the output into the CW Skimmer and the NaP3 panadapter display programs. This gives me the benefit of SDR capability where I can observe the band on the display and I can click on a signal on the display to go to that frequency. I use the Win4K3Suite software to handle the multiple control interfaces I use. I have the K3 USB interface upgrade fitted giving me the path for the control signals and receiver audio. This is standard functionality on most modern HF transceivers. I use the audio from the K3 with a Spectrum Lab program widget I put together to give the visual display mentioned earlier to allow accurately tuning for use with the audio peak filter.
On top of that, I also have a Red Pitaya “Swiss Army Knife for Engineers” data acquisition board monitoring 8 bands simultaneously and feeding CW and RTTY skimmer server software. The output of this is fed to the Reverse Beacon Network as well as my local cluster display. The only shortfall of this is that the Red Pitaya is connected to whatever antenna the K3 is switched to – if I am using the higher bands it won’t have an ideal antenna for the lower bands and vice versa. It does however give some indication of band activity when I am opting for an ‘’assisted’ entry.
The other nice little thing I use is ‘VOAProp’. This is a little propagation tool that displays a map of the world and shows the daylight and darkness around the world in real time. In addition, it displays contour lines of the signal strength that you are likely to achieve around the world on each band. These contours are based on a combination of data about your station that you have configured and online geophysical data that is automatically downloaded. It doesn’t help with transmitting or receiving other than to give you a feel for what bands might be worth trying for particular destinations.
A key ingredient in the contest was of course the other stations. Normally UK and Crown Dependency stations aren’t allowed to work each other in BERU but there is an exception for HQ stations. I had the privilege of being one of those stations and it was fun as UK stations were a significant slice of my pie.
There was ‘DX’ to be had with stations like C56DF (The Gambia – Don G3XTT), ZF2CA (Cayman Islands – Colin G4CWH), 3B8XF (Mauritius – Nigel G3TXF), V31GX (Belize – Iain G4SGX) and others. These can be hard enough countries to work in the bigger contests so BERU is an opportunity for the ‘small pistols’ to get something less common. You could tell from the serial numbers that some stations were only chipping in for a short time and maybe not going the full distance. They all add up and make the big picture bigger.
The CW operating speed tends to be lower and less urgent than the bigger contests and I would like to think that I dropped my speed when necessary to match incoming calls – I didn’t always hit the right key on the keyboard. It doesn’t matter if you are a high speed CW jockey, straight-keyer or keyboard monkey – all calls are welcome. BERU is a safe place to practice – look at me.
While there can be some very quiet times, it was not like when I did an eight hour CW session in the Greek Triathlon contest and only had three QSOs. I think it stands out as one of the pillars of our hobby.
Overall, given the limitations of this QTH and the equipment (and the patience of Mrs DOH), I am the weakest link at this end and no doubt will remain so. However, practice can only be a good thing and contests like BERU every year give us a benchmark to measure our own development. It was a great weekend and I really enjoyed the extra attention through having the use of the GI6XX call – and the carte blanche use of all my toys described above. I really appreciate the fact that we have so many enthusiasts throughout the world and also the patience of those that persevered in some of the more difficult QSOs with me. This is what amateur radio is about and I look forward to the next one.
Many thanks to all involved who made it such a great event.
Best 73
Rich GI4DOH (GI6XX BERU 2019)
