Grand Mesa Contesters

If you’re interested in participating in the bleeding edge of FT4 contesting, the Northern California Contest Club is sponsoring an HF sprint on Thursday evenings.  The exchange is different than you may be used to, but the theoretical maximum QSO rate can be up to 480 QSOs per hour!  If you get the National Contest Journal, there’s a good article explaining this technique starting on Page 27 of the Sep-Oct 2023 issue.  If you get QST or other ARRL publications online, the link is: https://edition.pagesuite.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pnum=29&edid=a6b6079a-6a5a-4b18-becb-10217068a65b&isshared=true.

There’s also a brief introduction here:  https://www.ncccsprint.com/ft4ns.html

Steve, K0GUZ

Here are a couple of ideas that may help you if you’re not receiving all of the groups.io digests or can’t post.  In both cases, you need to log into the web interface for groups.io then look at the GMCC group (if you subscribe to more than one group).  Click on your account (upper right corner drop down box). 

1.  Click on the “Bounces” option on the left.  This will give you a report of the number of times that your email has been bounced.  After a certain number of times that your email system has rejected incoming mail from groups.io, they’ll give up and assume that the email is invalid.  Check to make sure that your email is correct.  Also, sometimes groups.io is identified by one of the automated spam filters (like spambot) and all email from it is blocked by your email server.  This is usually fixed within hours, but if a GMCC digest was sent during that time, you’ll never see it, even in the “junk” folder.

2.  If you send something to the group using your email program, check the “login” tab at the left top.  Again, check to make sure that the email address is correct.  If you sometimes use a different address (such as k0guz@arrl.net) on your email, click on the “advanced settings for email” at the bottom of the groups.io login page and enter that alias.  If you don’t, and you send an email from “xyzabc@gmail.com” but have a return address of “xyzabc@arrl.net” then groups.io may assume you’re trying to spam the system and block your input.

3.  The @arrl.net forwarding service usually works but I’m sure that they have some pretty good filters to get rid of spam email; to make sure that it doesn’t discard your GMCC digests, use your real email, not @arrl.net.

4.  Finally, if all else fails, you can use the web interface to groups.io to send your message to the group.

Hope this helps.

72’s de Steve, K0GUZ

We are fortunate to have many skilled and talented members in our ranks.  It’s my hope that we can tap into their expertise with presentations of interest to all Colorado contesters.

First up is Alan Higbie,  K0AV, with a polished presentation on  HUNTING RFI.  Alan’s QTH is a typical urban lot,  with above ground power lines, neighbors with solar panels, and all kinds of potential noise sources both in his house and the surrounding area.

Instead of abandoning HF contesting,  Alan chose to become skilled at playing “wack a mole” and an expert at tracking down nagging RFI sources one by one.   His disciplined approach has led to success finding and curing his RFI.    

Please log in to this premier ZOOM presentation Thursday evening and hear Alan’s success story.    

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85800055185?pwd=eG9NNzhnV2JZdkxKSzdOUGJ5ekdBZz09

The meeting will start with brief introductions and move quickly to Alan’s presentation.   There are no business items on the agenda but there will be time to ask questions and share member activities after the presentation.

This chart was downloaded from contests.arrl.org, and it shows the official results of those who submitted logs and were a member of a GMCC team. As before, you can sort this list by any of the criteria – contest, year, callsign, score…. Or you can use the “search” function to bring up only the results tabulated by ARRL for your callsign. Enjoy!

In case you can’t go to Albuquerque, the Western Colorado ARC is sponsoring a hamfest in August. Several of your GMCC members will present at a forum on contesting:

This is a list, from the 3830scores.com database, of those who submitted contest scores to 3830 AND identified themselves as members of GMCC. It shows the results of for the prior year (and was created on July 20, 2023). It does not include any other data. The link to your callsign in this list is broken. I’m working on a fix.

There are over 1,200 entries, and you can sort the list by any of the criteria. If you have any issues with this list, check first with 3830scores.com to see if maybe you didn’t submit your scores. Then contact me.