Page 005OperatingŠiauliai
A contest weekend spent listening more than calling
For two days in the autumn the bands fill from end to end and the polite spaces vanish. I used to find contest weekends unbearable, and then I began using them for something other than the thing they are for.
- Date
- 13 June 2026
- UTC
- 0149
- Band
- 10 m
- Mode
- CW
- Typed up
- 25 August 2026
- Reading
- 6 min
Why I stopped counting
The first contest I entered properly, in 2021, I sat down at midnight with a list of multipliers and every intention of working through until morning. By three I was typing badly, calling the same loud stations twice and not hearing the quiet ones at all. The score, once I had sent it in, placed me somewhere in the middle of a list I did not care about. What those hours had taught me about my own station came to almost nothing.
The following autumn I went in with a different idea, and it has been the same one ever since. A contest is the only weekend of the year when every band is full of known, well-equipped stations sending the same short message at regular intervals, from every direction, for forty-eight hours. As a source of test signals for an amateur's garden antenna, nothing else comes close. I keep a score sheet because the rules ask for one, and I never add it up.
Planning a weekend around bands, not hours
The plan goes onto one sheet on the Friday evening, and it lists bands and times rather than targets. Ten metres in the middle of the day if the flux allows it, twenty across the afternoon, forty from dusk onwards, eighty after ten at night, and an hour before dawn on the Sunday whatever else happens. Each block runs a fixed length, thirty minutes or sixty, so that the notes stay comparable, and each one opens with two minutes of listening and writing down what is there.
Sleeping normally is part of the plan rather than a failure of it. The weekend is not a physical challenge, and treating it as one made my notes worse instead of better. Going to bed at midnight and getting up at half past four costs a handful of contacts and buys the pre-dawn hour, which is the most informative sixty minutes of the whole weekend on the low bands. Everything else in the plan is negotiable.
Noted in the margin
- One sheet written on Friday: bands and time blocks, no targets
- Fixed block lengths, so Saturday and Sunday can be compared
- Two minutes of listening before the first call in every block
- Sleep at midnight; the pre-dawn hour beats the small hours
What a crowded band teaches about an antenna
On an ordinary evening a quiet band tells you nothing, because there is no way to separate a poor antenna from an empty band. During a contest the band is never empty, which turns a vague question into a measurable one. If twenty metres is wall to wall and I am hearing the south well and the north-east poorly, that is the antenna and the ionosphere between them talking, and after enough weekends the pattern separates itself out from the weather.
The bent forty-metre wire gave itself away like this. Two contests running, stations towards the north-west came in two or three points below what people further round the compass were giving me, at hours when the path had no business being poor. That matched the ends of the wire, which run that way, and it matched what the neighbours' roof does to a low angle of radiation. Neither is fixable in this garden, but I stopped wondering about it.
Sunday afternoon, and what went in the notebook
By Sunday afternoon the bands thin out, the loud stations grow louder still, the weekend stops being useful, and I stop with it. The notebook then gets an hour of work while everything is fresh: each block copied onto a page, the strongest and weakest directions, the reports given and received wherever they surprised me, and a short note about anything in the station that misbehaved. Last autumn that note said the antenna switch is intermittent on the eighty-metre position, which it is.
The pages from four contest weekends sit together at the back of the log and they are the most useful thing in it. They are the only record I have of every band being tested at once by people who know exactly what they are doing. None of it makes me a contester, and the scores I send in are thoroughly unremarkable. The weekend pays for itself twice over in what it tells me about forty metres in November.