On April 22, 1999 I came back to Pontificia Università Lateranense
for a new activation of HV5PUL, along with other members of
ARI, Rome.
This time we operated three HF stations at the same time, plus one for
50 and 144 MHz.
Antennas where a 5 elements yagi for 6 meters, a 11 elements yagi for
2 meters, plus 2 multiband verticals and a dipole.
Three stations were just under the roof, while I operated from one of the
computer rooms of the University, mostly on RTTY.
While I operated a few persons entered the room to work on the other
computers and were attracted by the low, high-pitched sound coming
out from my radio (unfortunately I leaved my headphones at home).
Interestingly enough, sometimes we were four people of four
different continents.
WRBTTY program
This was also the first time I used WRBTTY,
a small simple Dos program I am developing to do contests on RTTY.
The program transmits and receives manually, lets you send four predefined
messages, where you can put variables referencing your QRZ, RST and serial
number, as well as the same data as received from the other station.
The program scans continuously received data, looking for strings that
are likely to be station calls and reports.
When all data you see are correct, you can log to a file simply pressing
a key or putting a variable in one of the predefined strings.
I wrote it in 3 days (ending the same morning I went to HV5PUL!) and
I used it, although there were still some serious bugs around.
I refined the program in one week and version 1.0 is now available
here on the software page.
The operations
My colleagues made hundreds of QSO in CW and SSB, while I was
warned many times that my station was disturbing the CW operations,
was entering the phones and even the radio-microphones used at the
conference. Terrible, for the only 50 Watt I was using!
So I had to stop many times and at the end I had only less than 100
QSO made. Well, not a problem, at next contests I will certainly do
better and the important thing was to let people know about the
Pope's University and the third annual meeting of his friends.
Stations contacted by me (IK0WRB)
(many others were contacted by the other operators in CW/SSB)