48 Hours

Well, I had a good sleep overnight.  Quite welcome, because I only managed about four hours over the past two whole days!

The reason?  The Russian Digital Radio Club's JT9 Activity Days.

I'm not at all a contester, but JT9 is nice and slow, allowing me to read an article in a magazine whilst gathering points.  Using JT9 also lets me be nostalgic about the years where JT9 was a superb way of gathering long-haul DX in a much less mindless way than FT8 and FT4.

Things were going reasonably well until 22UT on the Saturday.  Propagation was typical for the current solar conditions at 14MHz.  Activity slowed down a little for an hour or two, seemingly as people in the east went to sleep, or took a well-earned break.

Then, Windows 10 decided it wanted to update.  Feeling sleepy, I allowed it to go ahead.  After 20 minutes of blue screen, my soundcard interface generated the dreaded 'Error in audio input' message.  For the time being, I just rolled back to the previous version, and resumed activity for a while.

Now I took two hours off to sleep.  When I got up, band conditions were not so good, and continued to deteriorate for the remainder of the contest.  The geomagnetic field was a little disturbed at high latitudes, leading to me only managing about 60 QSOs on the Sunday - about two-thirds what I managed on the previous day.

During better propagation conditions, I generally used 5-8W with JT9 from my vertical delta loop.  Under the present solar minimum, I had to use at least 10W, and sometimes as high as 50W for the really tough ones.   I managed to complete QSOs on 40, 20, 17, 15 and 12m, though most were on 40 and 20m.

Incidentally, I discovered that my 17m delta does a very good job on 15m (twin fed), possibly better than my dedicated 15m delta, due to a better location.

48 hours is a very long time to operate continuously, and is a very unfriendly format for those - like family people - who can't just sit down for two solid days.  That does matter when we are losing the older operators, and not finding younger ones to replace them.

Still, for once in my life, that's what I did, and I totalled 536,315km, potentially with 3500km more due to a logging format error in one or two records.

Looking at last year's results, that total should see me reach fairly high up in the rankings, despite being a wire antenna operator on 14MHz.  The best thing is that there were quite a large number of people taking part in this reminder that JT9 continues to be a great weak signal mode.

Oh, and the solution to the Windows 10 update sound input error?  Turns out it's very simple: just go to Settings>Privacy>Microphone>Allow apps to access microphone (you can deselect all the ones you don't want to do this if you want).  Works fine!