W4KAZ

The propagation conditions were better to EU than its been for quite a long while.  That made the contest a lot more enjoyable than the DX contests have been over the past few years from here in the “cheap seats”[low power into low dipoles].  I’m sure the scores at the big stations will reflect the changes.

For my own part it went quite well-even with a small station

In the week before the contest, conditions were sounding good, with good openings on 15m and 20m.  There was no real plan to put in a heavy effort here, but instead to have fun and get in some CW practice.  Check.  Mission accomplished.

Overall, with conditions so much better it was easy to stay in the chair longer than planned. 15m opened early on both days, just after local sunrise.  20m was hot in the early afternoon, and 40m and 80m both opened to Europe earlier than I usually notice.  There were even a few QSO’s on the edges from 160m and 10m.  The 160m Q’s were early in the evening, when I was hearing a few EU stations, but they weren’t hearing the dulcet tones emanating from the Kazshack.  The 10m QSO’s were very fluttery, with lots of QSB, but worth chasing anyway.

The operating plan quickly morphed from “Search and Pounce” into finding a place to try to run.  The original idea was to operate “unlimited” and play “S&P2R”.  The network connection never got connected after tuning around a bit and shifting the gray matter into run mode.  Wedging into a good spot is always a problem, but once found the good conditions had the stations lining up.  Sometimes too many – a new experience from the KazShack.  But good spots were hard to find and a lot of time running was done at lower rates up in the “nosebleed” areas higher in the band.

The runs brought in a lot of surprises.  On 40m finding and working the KH6 was a surprise, as well as being called by a TA and a ZC up on 15m .  Early on the second day I also found a JA1 on 40m, but no joy – working left coast.  Some of the surprises were unusual enough to cause the brain to balk on copying the call sign correctly – V51 in particular.  A search and pounce sweep on 10m and 15m bagged ZM1A on 15m,  as well as five of the 10m mults.

15m showed signs of signals from Europe just after local sunrise, and they were able to hear me soon thereafter.  Probably an hour or so earlier than that for the stations with good 15m antennas.  But the lack of good antennas served to limit the volume of responses rather than shut the band to use.  I was able to run stations on 15m after 1230z on the second day.  Just a couple of hours later, and 20m became hospitable for a low power run above 14100.

Being a fan of 15m, not much time was spent in the local evening hours.  Its difficult for the DX to hear the 100w stations through their local QRM and QRN.  With 15m and 20m open, that’s not the disaster it has been in the past couple of years.

It will be interesting to see the scores and compare them to those of the past couple of years.

The Good:

• Conditions!
• More like fun, less like work
• Decent runs

The Bad:

• Problems with copy on unexpected calls
• Pile up skills

The Ugly:

• Possible problem with K2 KAT100 auto-tuner on Ant1, used ant2 for duration of the contest

********  ********

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:    5     5
   80:   55    28
   40:  191    46
   20:  187    45
   15:  131    45
   10:    8     6
-------------------
Total:  577   175  Total Score = 302,925

amended 2010/2/26

Nothing great, but not too shabby. 352 Qsos total.

Conditions and observations: Early in the contest conditions seemed poor to me, but perhaps I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the start, I tried to get a run going on 20m and use the second radio for S&P, but neither was working well. The run radio was slow on the 20m dipole. I guess all of those tri-banders out there have the advantage. 20m seemed long from the start, as I was called by a strong AL9A. Alaska is unusual so early in the afternoon on my dipole.

The S&P on 15m was none too productive either. There were a few stations there, but lots of QSB. Most seemed to give up calling on 15m pretty quickly[or vanished due to changes in propagation]. Nothing heard on 10m, but not a lot of time listening there either.

It is also obvious that I’ll need to become a much better operator before using the second radio during a run is practical. Even a slow run. But the NAQP’s are the perfect contests to use as a test platform for learning SO2R techniques.

On the other hand, S&P with two radios was a lot more productive than S&P with a single radio. Better than using a single radio and loading the band map. With two radios, the utility of the second band map also comes into effect. The rate went up as soon as I switched from running to all S&P. I didn’t hit my goal of 60/hr while S&Ping, but it is a goal within reason, and it was easy to keepa 40 to 50 rate with two radios without much stress.

Thats the first couple of hours. The late afternoon was broken up into S&P fragments, capped with a hour long 40m run from 2220z to2320z. Then another gap peppered with a handful of quick S&P Q’s and a break for a sandwich.

Shifting down to 80m, I S&P’d my way to a mostly clear frequency at 3563.75, and thenheld a two hour run there from 0100z to 0300z. While the rates were meager for somebody like Bigg Gunn Kontester over at the Fi-Ni Report, both those hours on 80m were over 60/hr. I gave it up soon after W4HSA called me, and I just could not get his call correct, even when he resorted to sending his call suffix at about 5wpm. Such is life in LidVille. Duh-OH!

Still short of 300 Q’s. Tuning around 40m was discouraging, as the band sounded really long and there were not a lot of stations calling. 80m seemed like mostly dupes, so on a whim it seemed time to check conditions down on 160m.

The 160m antenna was playing well again. There were only three stations that were called with no answer. Soon enough stations were S&P’d to get to 340 Q’s in the log.

A few more passes on 80m and 160m, and the plug was pulled at around 0400z withjust over 350 logged. The total time on the clock was about 9 hours, but a lot of that was spent away from the radio in increments more than 5 minutes, but less than 30.

The Good:

• Just over two consecutive hours with rates over 60/hr. First time I’ve had two such hours back-to-back.
• 160m antenna continues to function well

The Bad:

• A moment of Murphy when switching to 80m. The kludged-together band pass filter switching resulted in a few moments of angst filled debugging when it appeared the 80m antenna was showing a high SWR. [Operator Error.]
• No productivity early in the contest.
• 20m slow.

The Ugly:

• Total mental shutdown trying to copy W4HSA. Too bad it can’t be blamed on being exhausted or a weak signal. Nope. Just a lid moment here in the KazShack.

Summary:

Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
 160:  40  19
  80: 167  36
  40:  89  31
  20:  45  19
  15:  11   3
  10:     
-------------------
Total: 352  108 Total Score = 38,016

*

amended 11/23/2009, noon

This year’s SSB contest was great motivation to become a better CW OP.

It should have been obvious when the RigBlaster turned up dead Tuesday evening that Murphy had decided to grace the KazShack with his exuberant best during the SSB portion of Sweepstakes. Or maybe the K.I.S.S.(Keep It Simple, Stupid!) rule should have been followed when working around the hole the absent RigBlaster introduced into the scheme. The audio check test runs Thursday evening would have helped identify the problems, but the work-around was not prepared by then. Such is Life.

The long and short is that I really lidded up the bands with RF infested audio. The problem was much worse with the FT-920 for some reason, but the K2 was not a whole lot better. And yet, people still dug it out. The one curiosity in the entire thing is that the FT-920 monitor sounds pristine. It seems like I read somewhere the monitor on that radio is before the RF sections – but not sure why RF on the line is not causing the audio monitor to be distorted as well.

The DVK audio from the computer was the worst. The pipes suffered from that, since the voice is still not 100 percent from an issue over the holidays in 2008.

My intent was to enjoy the contest, and play with SO2R. As it turned out, it was more like SO(0.33)R – except the audio was crap from both radios. The nasty audio didn’t do much to encourage answers to CQ’s, so most of the activity came down to S&P. Even if I had planned to operate class “A”, I’d probably have ditched that and turned on the packet system anyway – even if it had resulted in a checklog.

Watching the spots was probably the highlight. I spent a lot of time spotting as much as I could find that was not already on the band map, as well as any stations that seemed to be having a slow period when we crossed paths.

I had better luck on 15m than on 20m. 20m is tough sledding with a dipole and low power compared to the other bands. Probably did not spend enough time on 40m. The resurrected 15m/10m rectangular loop paid off with a few mults I think I would have otherwise missed.

Since I had time to toy with the second radio(in rx anyway), I came to the conclusion that SO2R on SSB is going to be several orders of magnitude more difficult than on CW. It seems it will be a whole lot simpler to mentally filter out CW signals on either ear than with SSB.

With CW it’s just a stereo pile-up. With SSB it is more like Donald Duck talking with Peanuts’/Charlie Brown adults at a Van Halen concert, all played to the background melody of RTTY and slow scan tuner-uppers.

Quoth Snoopy…”Bleh”.

It is always curious to see which sections will be left on the table. No Quebec? That’s not normally one that goes missing. Rhode Island is a bit easier to miss from the QTH. The other three, MB, BC, NT, are sections that are “the usual suspects”, so missing those is no big surprise. AK and PAC turned out to be easier than normal when I stumbled upon stations from both before they were spotted. I picked up the first AB station in a similar manner, but later worked a couple more. I had an OK station call me during my one 40m run, but I was not able to copy him through the “donald duck” QRM. The 6’s were all tough with the poor audio.

Almost zero time was spent in packet pile-ups. Three calls then move along. That was probably necessary with Murph’s bad audio on top of the low power crappy antennas. No one trying to manage a pile up is going to waste time on a weak station with bad audio. Thats not to hard too understand, and it sure makes sense. So there is even less point in wasting time that way than normal.

Missed:
RI QC MB BC NT

The Good:

• The SO2R switching performed flawlessly. I made a lot of use of the “follow active radio” feature when S&P.
• The momentary contact buttons on the SO2R control are a great feature. It is really easy to jab a button to concentrate on one radio. This is especially true in SSB, because SSB is harder to separate mentally than with CW.
• Need to implement foot switches for that momentary audio switching, as K4QPL suggested. That’s a great idea.
• Lots of fun spotting folks otherwise lost in the cracks.
• If his serial number reflected actual Q’s KA1ARB’s station was kicking butts and taking callsigns. Nice to see somebody was having a good contest.

The Bad:

• Murphy. ’nuff said.

The Ugly:

• Missed Thursday evening “test” contest, which may have helped fix the problems.
• OK – maybe not quite ’nuff said. Initial cables for SSB audio seem susceptible to RFI. Need to solve that. Prefer to have the RF at the end of the coax and on the antennas rather than floating around the shack!
• Computer DVK – crappy audio. WHY? Just another RFI problem?

The Final Damage:

Summary:
Band  QSOs
------------
160:    0
80:  191
40:   93
20:   35
15:   42
10:    0
------------
Total:  361  Sections = 75  Total Score = 54,150

A big scheduling conundrum – LSU v. Alabama game scheduled at the same time as the start of SS CW. Hmmmm.

The allure of a possible shot at another run at the BCS title by LSU had me hedging at the start of the contest. No TV in the shack, nor time to set one up, so my compromise was I would hit the radio if/when the lads fall behind. I expected that to happen sooner rather than later, but the Tigers kept me from seriously attacking the initial contest bedlam for a couple of hours – before losing.

So I walk down into the shack at halftime, towards the end of the first hour. I put on the headphones. The right hand radio just happens to be sitting right on top of VE8EV. (Booming in too) BANG – Two calls, and the first QSO logged is the NT section. ?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!! First time I work them in SS.

Checking the spots next, VE7 and BC section – BANG second QSO logged on first call. WP3R – BANG, third QSO.

Three mults that are usually scarce here, all in about five minutes. Given my normal luck rounding up these guys, I considered pulling the plug right there. 😮 (I didn’t!)

Finished up the contest a bit behind the 2008 effort, but not by a lot. A new RFI problem kept knocking down the ISP connection on 80m, and on one of the 20m antennas.

Spent most of the contest flying low and slow, and the flak from the BigGunZ was intermittent. Spent most of my time running at the expected low-power-low-skill rates. Used the second radio a lot during the S&P sessions.

Two radio S&P gave me rates close to my average run rate, but I never got the 10 minute S&P rate above 50(goal was 60+, with over 45 for 60 minutes). Only S&P’d a short while looking for 6’s and 7’s. Found clear frequencies low in the band a couple of times for a couple of productive but short in duration runs.

Skipped past all of the packet pile-ups if they didn’t hear me after the second call. The two radio S&P rate was too good to waste time on a VO1 packet pileup.

Never heard a peep from WTX or ID. Didn’t look too hard either.

80m conditions were good. Some of the QRP stations sounded like high power big guns. The short skip to the NE and NW was good.

Missed:

WTX ID AK NL

Station:

SO2R with Elecraft K2 and Yaesu F-920.

Antennas:

• 80m: folded dipole @ 50ft
• 40m: 2 dipoles at right angles, @ 45ft, reflector added to E/W to form 2 el. wire yagi.
• 20m: E/W dipole @50ft
• 15m/10m: Nested rectangular loops, top at 60ft

The Good:

• The 40m reflector. This played very well for a domestic contest. Interaction caused favorable signal levels in the desired directions, and about four S-unit difference in certain directions between the two.
• Working NT section as the first QSO, only two calls.
• Short runs on 20m, better than normal
• Runs on 40m better than last year, worked more 6’s than before.

The Bad:

• Missed the first two hours
• No sweep. “ID” section I understand, but “WTX”?

The Ugly:

• RFI knocking down ISP. Rendered one 20m antenna useless, and also a problem on 80m.

The Final Damage

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
  160:    0
   80:  272
   40:  195
   20:   98
   15:   20
   10:    0
------------
Total:  585  Sections = 76  Total Score = 88,920

It turned out to be a wonderful weekend for a radio contest. The weather here in central North Carolina was crappy, but not crappy enough to ruin the radio conditions completely. The bands were noisy, but the QRM was much worse than the QRN. Finding a clear frequency to run seemed the bigger problem.

So it was great to sit at the controls of N1LN for several stretches over the weekend. The company is good, and the operating was fun too.

The start of the contest had me on the 20m station. Propagation at the start of the contest seemed very strange, and I was not able to establish a good run. S&P was also problematic. Signals were strong, but I was getting mixed results trying to pick up mults from the band map.

Over the evening, 40m showed mixed results, but I felt better about my first stretch there. This was the first time I had used N1LN’s beverages on 40m, and they definitely helped reduce noise levels for copy on weaker signals.

I had the great good fortune to pull the slots that resulted in being at the helm for the beginning of the day on 15m. The end of my slot for Saturday morning showed 15m opening to Europe just after 11:00z. I took a short break from the (then) low rate 40m drudgery for a toasted bagel around 11:20z. When I sat back down at the station at 11:35z, the band map was full of fresh juicy EU mults, just begging to be cherry picked. I worked through most of those relatively quickly, then spun the dial and started S&Ping EU stations. That shift was relieved by KA1ARB , and Rob had a good three hour slot there.

Based on the conditions of Saturday morning, it seemed like a good idea to be ready for action on 15m Sunday morning. When I checked the operator schedule again I realized I’d be one of the operators on deck for another slot beginning 10:00z Sunday morning. By keeping a close ear to the signals on 15m, I was able to get a nice 15m run going before the band became crowded. It was very encouraging to hear how good 15m was for a change. We had good fortune operating on 15m during the daylight hours and into the early evening both days.

20m was also productive, as it remained open well into the evening. It was often a real struggle to copy stations through the QRM, and maintaining a run was difficult there.

The low bands were tougher sledding, but the other ops had better luck rounding up mults down there than I did. N1LN’s beverages were often crucial to QSO productivity, as they made rx much easier.

Call: N1LN
Operator(s): W4KAZ, N4YDU, KA1ARB, K4CZ, N4TCP, N1YXU, N1LN
Station: N1LN

Class: M/2 HP
QTH: NC-05
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:
Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
160:   78    14       30
80:  290    19       82
40:  573    30      107
20: 1113    34      131
15:  924    29      129
10:   98    10       24
------------------------------
Total: 3076   136      503  Total Score = 5,018,706