[NLRS] January VHF Sweepstakes

[John P. Toscano]

1) The WØJT station should be QRV on 50 through 1296 MHz this weekend. 
If a rover station wants to pull into my driveway, or into the park 
across the street, I suppose I could drag out the 10GHz rig, but 
othewise I have no hope of succeeding on that band from my QTH in EN34js 
in a hole surrounded by tall trees and a big hill to my north.  Maybe 
someday I can put up a tower that is tall enough to look out over the 
trees and work 10 GHz from home. . . (hey, if a guy isn't allowed to 
daydream a little, it sure makes it harder to get out of bed in the 
morning!)

2) If (like me) you are using the VHF-DX logging software (and possibly 
some other programs), remember that this is the only ARRL VHF & Up 
contest that occurs during Standard Time instead of Daylight Savings 
Time. Unfortunately, VHF-DX has to be MANUALLY told whether DST is in 
effect or not AT THE TIME OF THE LOGGING. More modern programs only need 
to know if your location obeys the DST rules, and they figure out from 
the date whether or not DST is in effect at the time of the contact.  If 
your computer's clock is set to UTC and the software is also, then you 
should have no problem, but I can't bring myself to do that. One of 
these days, I need to take the time to obtain and get comfortable with 
some other logging program. (Back in the days when the concept of "free 
time" was not just a hypothetical, illusory concept, I would have even 
added, "or write my own program". But that's not likely to happen 
anytime soon, as I am currently back to working 14-hour days and many 
weekends.)

In case you are having a hard time remembering,
   UTC = CST + 6  (1PM local = 1300 CST = 1900 UTC) "winter time"
   UTC = CDT + 5  (1PM local = 1300 CDT = 1800 UTC) "summer time"

Personally, I have one of those radio controlled clocks in my shack that 
listens for WWVB in the wee hours every day to keep itself synchronized 
to within a second of the NIST atomic clocks, and it is set to display 
UTC, in case I am ever confused about the conversion between the time on 
my watch and the time that needs to go into the log. (My wristwatch is 
also one of those radio-controlled watches, but I have it set to local 
time...)

3) To piggyback onto Jon's commments, VHF-DX does allow WØZQ and WØZQ/R 
in the log as unique contacts (good), but it also allows WoZQ (bad). In 
the past, the robot has caught those goofs (invalid callsign, contains 
no numeric digits) for me and allowed me to fix the log and re-submit 
it, but I haven't sent a log through the robot since the LCR's began on 
the bands above 50 MHz as far as I can recall...

Good hunting this weekend to all!
73 de WØJT
EN34js, Apple Valley, MN