Thursday 14 February 2013

CQ Magazine's Annual DX Marathon



After reading John AE5X blog did I become aware of the interesting activity refered to in the link below.


This looks like an interesting activity, almost like contesting from the slow lane.

Every year one starts off fresh with a clean slate and a new set of goals.

The “formula class” might appeal to many radio amateurs with limited resources (basic antennas and without power amplifiers).

I fail to understand why a rotatable dipole is grouped with gain antennas: Yagi, Quads and the like. A dipole is dipole and it has no gain. In fact it serves as the base reference when comparing antennas. I think that restriction is daft.
  
would love to participate as formula 1, but I do not have gain antennas. Plan-B would be to participate as formula 2, but a rotatable dipole is not permissible. Just goes to prove it is impossible to please everyone.


5 comments:

  1. You may be interested in the book "A Year of DX" by W9KNI, which documents the author's participation in the DX Marathon for one year. I enjoyed it!

    http://www.idiompress.com/yearofdx.php

    Jason NT7S

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  2. Jason,

    I should be ashamed. I have both the books by Bob Locher W9KNI. I have read most of the “The Complete DX’er” and found many valuable pointers in the book. I have not got around to reading “The DX Marathon for one year” yet.

    Thanks for the info; I will now certainly make a point of reading it.

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  3. The best part of DX Marathon is that it provides incentive to re-work all the entities you might otherwise tune on by since you've worked them before.

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  4. Hi Pierre

    Please supply the link where u read the rules about rotating dipole please.

    ZS6AF

    Johan

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  5. Johan,

    http://www.dxmarathon.com/Rules/2013/2013%20Rules.htm

    ReplyDelete