I was minding my own business last night working a bit of 20m RTTY. Conditions weren’t great and the band wasn’t particularly busy but there were a few stations in QSO as I tuned across the RTTY sub-band between 14.080 and 14.100MHz, all of them within Europe.
I found myself what appeared to be a clear spot up around 14.092MHz and sent the usual ‘QRL QRL ??? DE G0RIF BK‘ a time or three to see if anyone was using the frequency. On getting no reply I set about calling CQ to see who I could work.
I worked a few stations and had just cleared the last of those when I saw in the decode window ‘DE RA1DIO RA1DIO RA1DIO PSE K‘ (NB: RA1DIO is not the actual callsign of the Russian station in question). As this was spot-on my calling frequency I took this to be a tail end call so I sent a quick RST/NAME/QTH transmission and waited for his reply…which never came.
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Dean Amateur Radio, Totally random CQ, QRM, RTTY
I wrote back in March about the pros and cons of macros in amateur digital communications, particularly RTTY and PSK31. Since that time I have been much more aware of not over doing the use of macros and as you will see from the recent posts about my 30m contacts last week I have been enjoying some nice long ragchew contacts on both PSK31 and RTTY.
I have seen suggestions that if you’re looking for more than the simple rubber stamp exchanges, which can amount to no more than a brief exchange of macros, then calling ‘CQ ragchew’ might be a good idea. I’m not sure about that because I’m sure not all amateur radio operators for whom English is not their first language would understand.
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Dean Amateur Radio CQ, macro, PSK31, ragchew, RTTY
I’ve seen it written somewhere that many receivers don’t make for a busy band. What this means is that if everyone is listening, scanning the bands for stations, no contacts will result. Someone somewhere has to call CQ to initiate a contact (for non amateur radio types a ‘CQ call’ is a ‘hello…is there anybody out there’ invitation to other stations to reply and establish a contact, or QSO).
With that in mind I have over the past week made many CQ calls (different bands, different modes) in attempts to make some contacts on otherwise quiet bands. My results were a bit disappointing to say the least. I managed to work a clutch of close-in European stations (from Germany and Spain) but apart from that I was calling in vain - hence my title for this post - ‘CQ fatigue’.
Now I know my antenna isn’t great (but I am resigned to living with it until I can think of some ingenious alternative) and I know conditions aren’t at their best (although they have been a bit variable over the week), but is it really THAT bad, that in hours of callling CQ I get so few replies? It’s been that bad I have even dared venture onto 50MHz yesterday (2 contacts) and 144MHz this afternoon (no contacts)! I hope things improve soon.
Dean Amateur Radio antenna, CQ, propagation, QSO