CQ Amateur Radio November 2021

NOVEMBER CONGRESS, ARIZONA — The Hassayampa Amateur Radio Klub will hold its HARKfest Tailgate Hamfest from 8 a.m. to noon, Saturday, November 6 at the North Ranch Escapees RV Park, 30625 S. Highway 89. Contact: Duane Grooms, KDØKYK, <djgrooms@yahoo.com>. Website: <www.harkaz.org>. Talk-in 146.620 (PL 162.2). VE exams, card checking. ENID, OKLAHOMA — The Enid Amateur Radio Club will hold the 2021 Enid Hamfest from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, November 6 at the Garfield County Fairgrounds – Hoover Building, 305 East Oxford Avenue. Contact: Bill Nokes, W5EIY, (580) 716-4788. Email: <nokes3139@gmail.com>. Website: <http://enidarc.org>. Talk-in 145.290-, 147.150+, or 444.825+. VE exams. PARSIPPANY, NEW JERSEY — The New Jersey Antique Radio Club will hold its Swapmeet from 8 a.m. to noon, Saturday, November 6 at the Parsippany PAL, 33 Baldwin Road. Contact: Richard Lee,…

Multiple Events Planned for Centennial of “Transatlantic Tests” Next month will mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 “Transatlantic Tests” that signaled the beginnings of international shortwave communications via amateur radio, and many events and activities are planned to mark the occasion, including an article here in CQ next month. The ARRL and RSGB (Radio Society of Great Britain) are jointly sponsoring several events, according to the ARRL Letter. The first will be the Transatlantic Centenary QSO Party on 160 meters between 0200 and 0600 UTC on December 12th, the date on which ARRL’s Paul Godley, 2ZE, at a station set up in Androssan, Scotland, successfully received the signals of several amateur stations in North America. The first was 1BCG in Connecticut, operated by members of the Radio Club of America. For…

Radio clubs. Quick! Close your eyes (but remember to open them again). What is the image that came to your mind when you thought about “radio clubs?” Was it a bunch of old men reminiscing about past sunspot cycles and complaining about new digital modes? Or was it an enthusiastic group working together on a kit-building project? Was it a boring recitation of committee reports? Or was it planning for the club’s next high-altitude balloon launch? Was everybody in the same room together? Or were members at home on Zoom®, listening to a technical presentation from an expert 1,000 miles away? I could go on and on, but by now you should see the pattern. Radio clubs are about as old as radio itself. Some hams, even some of our leaders,…

Astronomers are reporting the debut of a long-anticipated new meteor shower, the Arids, which began showing signs of activity in late September and peaked on October 7th. According to <spaceweather.com>, the meteors originated from comet 15P/Findlay, which ejected large amounts of debris into interplanetary space on visits to the inner solar system in 1995 and 2015 (the comet has a 6-year orbit around the Sun and made another pass through our cosmic neighborhood earlier this year). According to a report on <inverse.com>, the SETI Institute tweeted out the following information on September 30th: “The Arid shower has never before been seen, but the event was predicted by astronomers tracing the evolution of meteoroids ejected by comet 15P/Finlay during its return to the inner solar system in 1995. The stream of particles…

Editor’s note: At the time this was written, the UCØB team members did not know their final score or final ranking in the 2021 CQ WPX CW Contest, whose results are published in this issue. From our QTH in the geographic center of the Asian continent, statistics show that it is almost impossible to achieve a competitive result in the CQWW and CQ WPX contests. We were prompted to participate in this year’s CQ WPX CW Contest by the emergence of a new category, Multi-Distributed.1 We discussed and simulated how this can be implemented in our situation—Asiatic Russia / WAZ Zone 18. Our club, the Central Siberia DX Club, has previous experience in similar operations running the R9HQ and RØHQ headquarters stations in the IARU HF World Championship. Multi-distributed is close…

Are we there yet? The age-old question of weary travelers everywhere. Where are we on the journey to the return of contest normalcy? We’ve certainly made progress. CQWW WPX CW (WPX CW) 2021 participation surpassed the record levels set in 2020. This historic growth was powered by a 46% increase in multi-operator (multi-op) entries and 56% increase in operators as compared to 2020. Further, multi-op metrics exceeded pre-pandemic levels seen in 2019. The surge in multi-op activity was not at the expense of the single operator (single-op) categories, as the number of single-op participants was nearly unchanged from last year, as shown in Table 1. More good news — a review of the WPX CW top scores clearly demonstrates the resumption of contest expeditions. Now, if Cycle 25 would just…