When I began hamming, I had an old Kenwood TS-50S that didn't have a properly-functioning tuning spinner; it turned at the same slow speed, no matter how quickly one turned it. To skip along the band quickly, you had to press a certain sequence of keys, which would then speed things up a lot.
 |
| You can really get to hate this crap... |
This turned out to be a big advantage that allowed me to pick up DX calling CQ that I would almost certainly not have detected had I been spinning the tuning knob. Even with my newer TS480, which does spin at varying speeds, it's still too slow to scan across the band quickly. Luckily, HRD lets you tune with any steps you care to input, restoring the TS50's rapid tuning of old. You can use the keyboard or mouse wheel to do this.
So, step one is to avoid the DX cluster. By the time it's been put on the cluster, there will be a flood of people with stations much better than yours piling in to start shouting like madmen, so chances are you won't get a look in (though by all means, have a go; sometimes you will get heard!) Avoiding the cluster also means you won't spend half a day chasing one callsign when, had you left it and gone tuning around the band elsewhere, you may have grabbed many more - or something even more exotic!
Step two is to employ any method - your rig's controls or software - to rapidly hop up and down the band. It's surprising how quickly your ear tunes to weak CQs being called in distant lands that haven't yet been heard by anyone else. This is one of the key methods of securing good DX when your station is fairly simple, and pretty much how I completed the first 100 countries.
No comments:
Post a Comment