Dutch PACC contest

I was wondering if i should put it up on my blog as i am not fond of contests at all.
Many amateurs become very ignorant, rude, and non ham like when they start to contest.
There for I never enter any contests. except for one.  (no offense intended to proper ham's who follow normal etticets)

The Dutch PACC contest is the only one i want to enter. the contest is to work as many dutch stations as possible. So that means that for dutch amateurs, there will be a good chance that they will make a lot of QSO's with stations they would otherwise not be able to work due to pile up.

Why is this you might ask?.... Well... Holland (or better and correct: The Netherlands) is a bit densely populated. therefor we have not that much room for huge antenna towers as some other countries.
Also the legal limit of 400wats pep is lower then a lot of other countries. So a lot of dutch ham's stick to the 100 or 200 watts that come out of their rigs.

So when a dutch station is calling out for a distant station, it becomes hard to get through the pileups when you have to compete with a lot of "big gun" stations.

Off course there are exceptions. In the Netherlands we have a lot of these "big gun" stations as well.
But we have a lot of simple stations as well. with onluy 1 vertical or a few wire antenna's. (like myself)

Anyway, last year i wanted to enter as well, but some thing came up and i could not join the fun.
This year i took the friday and Monday around the PACC weekend off as well, so i can properly try my best to make some nice QSO's.

Contest time/date: 12:00 UTC 09 Feb 2013 - 12:00 UTC 10 Feb 2013
Contest info: http://pacc.veron.nl/      


I'll see if i can post on my twitter account (@PA1SBM)  and here on what frequency i am operating.
But please bare with me if i get a pile up.... i am not a contest operator :) 

BITX20 - 20. VFO still not at the right frequency ....

This week, while i had the week off,  i have been busy mostly with rebuilding the attic. i bought my house 3 years ago, and the attic was one big room. It's now divided into a separate storage and a guest bedroom. but this is more for a different blog, back to tech stuff :)

I also had some time for fiddling around with the VFO again and i do not get the bloody thing on the frequency it should be at which is about 14.175 - 9.9953 = approx 4.180 MHz. My VFO is running at twice the frequency.

So somewhere there must be a weird thing i did wrong. I am very sure about that, but WHAT!?!?!?!
I started to check the components if i did not stick a wrong capacitor or resistor somewhere, but no luck so far. I also started to fiddle around with the windings on the coil, but the difference i get is too little for making up for the double frequency.

At this point i am staring blindly at this, so i have decided to give it a rest for a bit and start to build the amplifier section first. This again needs lots of coil winding, and oh my i love that so much.... not.... :)

So keep watching the blog. as that  section will be done be for the end of the upcoming week.... i hope :)

73's
Alex, PA1SBM