W4KAZ

Update, Aug 1st 2008: New photos added to N4A website

The N4A trip with N4YDU and K4CZ was great. (Check out the N4A website for more photos, more to come soon.) Having K4CZ along made the set up a snap, and we had good weather too. Outstanding. The calm weather had the ocean calmed, and the water at the beach was postcard perfect all weekend. While checking in for our room, the ranger noted that the previous week’s tropical depression had washed lots of shells ashore. The conch shells near the campground had already been gathered, but the tide line was covered with all sizes of clam shells, some of which were five or six inches across. Hugh.

“Good” weather is relative. It was still hot, pushing 90ц, but the humidity was somewhat less than normal because of a cool front in the area. We were able to set up in relative comfort for July at the NC coast.Instead of suffering from near heat stroke, we were merely hot and sweaty.

The station set up went well enough. Propagation conditions did not really open to Europe very well, so most of our QSO’s were with domestic stations. The noise levels on 80m were high, and 80m wound up being almost entirely useless. 40m was similarly disappointing, with high noise to signal ratio’s.

K4CZ and I had a chuckle about Saturday evening. After a long day, with little sleep the previous evening, and then running stations for nearly four hours, rates slowed Saturday evening and N4YDU hit the relatively early sack for some well earned sleep. The cabin is small, basically one room. K4CZ and I had the audio on speaker, and were sometimes not sure of some of the faster exchanges. N4YDU was answering our exchange questions in his sleep! The man really is a CW machine.

Our final score was significantly better than last year, but it looks as though we may have been outdone this year. We wound up with 635000+ points on 882 total QSO’s and 134 mults. That’s almost 300 more QSO’s than 2007. My own personal goal was for the group to reach 750 QSO’s, and we made that. So I’m pretty happy with the operation, even if another team has done better.

It was a great weekend.

The IARU is always a contest I enjoy, because I like the mixed mode work everybody format. I had more time available than expected to operate, and I did better than expected.

The morning was slow, but things picked up in the evening. I was able to hold a run frequency on 20m, something that is unusual. I operated almost entirely CW, so I expect to take a well deserved beating in log checking, as my CW accuracy needs a lot more elbow grease than I have applied.

This was the first real try out in a contest for my Elecraft K2, and I am very pleased with the radio. I was trying to practice running, but found myself fascinated by how much nicer S&P is on the K2 with the filters crunched down. Every 200 hz another workable station popped up. I found that I needed to tune slowly just to keep from missing stations in the crowd. I still was able to find a hole now and then, and when I did I parked and gave a shout. Some of these runs were short but productive. But the Big Dawgs will have no reason to fear the upstart pups this year. 😮

Most of my contacts were domestic, and a large part of that was one-pointers. Given the relatively low dipoles I have, that’s not a big surprise. I was surprised at how close-in the 80m propagation seemed to be. 80m just did not seem to be giving me many contacts into the mid-west, and very little in the southeast. Curious.

I also probably did not hit 40m as hard as I should have. There did seem to be more DX moving up into their new allocations between 7.100mc and 7.200mc., and that is a good thing. It will really be a fun band once the broadcast stations exit stage right. As it stands now, the broadcasters make a lot of the upper parts of the band mostly useless. I could hear the Eu ops well enough on 40m, but its a little like pulling onto the freeway with a moped. Big Dawg territory. So the pup soon departed, tail between his legs.

Leaving 40m turned up a real plum on 20m, AL1G. Its been two or three years since any AK stations have been able to hear me, so that was a nice surprise.

Overall, propagation was not terrible domestically, but the low dipoles were not getting into EU. 20m was my best band, 80m didn’t pay off, and 40m was too intimidating. Picked a very few cherries on the high bands, but completely FORGOT to check 160. Duh-OH!

Hopefully we will have better luck with DX during IOTA in two weeks.

Station: W4KAZ
Class: SO Mixed LP
QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs): 13.5
Summary:
 Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs  Zones  HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
  160:    0      0      0       0
   80:   57     24      5       3
   40:   82     14     10      15
   20:  156      9     11      13
   15:   14      9      5       5
   10:    9      5      5       1
-------------------------------------
Total:  318     60     36      39  Total Score = 58,950