Outreach
Two ways to work with the club: making a contact that is challenging to complete, and studying why the challenge exists.
Contacts over difficult HF paths
If you are looking for a contact with the U.S. (or W1 area) where propagation is a challenge, you can monitor pskreporter directly or with a purpose-built app. WU1ITU will almost always call CQ without a specified destination (such as CQ DX or CQ EU) but prioritizes the greatest distances, most unusual paths, and (where known) newest licensees to answer. If you hear us and we are not answering, sometimes the best solution is trying different Tx offsets. Otherwise:
- Email wu1itu@wu1itu.club with your callsign, location or grid, and the modes you can use.
- We are sometimes able to try on an uncluttered frequency or less common mode (e.g., Q65 vs. FT8).
- Unfortunately, we often cannot accomodate periodic, "marathon"-style events, e.g., you have already worked us but not this calendar year.
- We can do LoTW immediately if the QSO is a milestone for you (e.g., you’re posting about the QSO to social media).
Research collaborations
The club is interested in how amateur radio software interacts with HF and VHF propagation. Our past reports looked at eclipse effects on 40 m and at Deep Search decoding of EME signals. We welcome collaborators on questions like these:
- Decoder sensitivity tradeoffs (finishing a valid QSO vs. shutting down too early after a decoding artifact).
- Separating true openings with a single publicly recorded decode from the many competing false decodes.
- Openings that are missed because no well-equipped station on either side has been transmitting.
- Any research projects by students (even if not licensed amateurs) on related topics.