N4ZR’s<\/a> skimmer node, the band maps are populated in a very short time.\u00c2\u00a0 Very interesting.<\/p>\nWith the weekend shaping up as an hour or two here and there, poking spots seemed like a good idea. Friday night turned into a bust, with a local T-storm showing up overhead around 0100Z.\u00c2\u00a0 Bail!\u00c2\u00a0 Saturday morning conditions were poor.\u00c2\u00a0 Normally loud EU stations were not, and few were hearing the low-power-low-antennas from the KazShack very well, so it became mostly a click and shoot on US stations and the occasional loud DX.\u00c2\u00a0 A few 15m Q’s added to the mix, but not generally good propagation.\u00c2\u00a0 20m opened\u00c2\u00a0 to EU around 2000z, with 40m picking up just a bit later.\u00c2\u00a0 Seemed more like mid-summer IOTA propagation.<\/p>\n
Conditions Sunday seemed a bit improved, but less time spent on the air, missing the late afternoon opening entirely.\u00c2\u00a0 Closed out the contest trying to run on 40m, which produced a few interesting Q’s.<\/p>\n
Things to Fix:<\/strong><\/em> Fix LID operator!\u00c2\u00a0 Need to decide how best to correct the SO2R audio switching.\u00c2\u00a0 Simply reversing the L\/R phone audio might be easiest fix, but probably would best be served by figuring out exactly what was haywired originally
<\/p>\nThe GOOD:<\/strong><\/em> SO2R set up performs flawlessly.\u00c2\u00a0 New ShackBox CPU also integrated without problems.\u00c2\u00a0 Skimmer spots are more useful than ordinary packet spots, would be ideal with a local node[great club project idea].\u00c2\u00a0 Good results on 40m, conditions seemed good there and even had a good mix of EU stations call into my run in the last hour.<\/p>\nThe BAD:<\/strong><\/em> Propagation seems to have returned to ‘no sunspot’ mode, and summertime conditions have already taken hold.<\/p>\nThe UGLY:<\/strong><\/em> Busted calls.\u00c2\u00a0 Busted exchanges.\u00c2\u00a0 Busted LID operator.<\/p>\nCall: NR3X\r\nOperator(s): W4KAZ; Station: W4KAZ\r\n\r\nSummary:\r\n Band QSOs\r\n------------\r\n 160:\r\n 80: 1\r\n 40: 86\r\n 20: 140\r\n 15: 28\r\n 10: 11\r\n------------\r\nTotal: 266 Prefixes = 182 Total Score = 116,298<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"N4YDU was on the sidelines\/out-of-action for the weekend, so I took NR3X out for a spin in the WPX.\u00c2 So for those who would be wondering why NR3X was suddenly a lid, well, there it is.\u00c2 Apologies to all who expected NR3X to be piloted by a good CW op.<\/p>\n
Original plans to put in a more serious effort evaporated, so it became a great chance to play SO2R using spots.\u00c2 Logged about 8 hours total Butt-In-Chair time over the entire contest.\u00c2 The shack has a new scavenged computer, so it needed a shakedown anyway.\u00c2 The one item not ready was the Winkeyer2, which showed up in the mailbox only a few hours before ‘showtime’ on Friday. Despite an initial urge to slap the winkeyer together, it remained(s)\u00c2 un-built.\u00c2 Lacking an additional USB to serial interface, it could not have been used\u00c2 anyway.\u00c2 Soon!<\/p>\n
The ‘new’ ShackBox CPU has a clean win XP install.\u00c2 On a tip found on the Writelog support forum,\u00c2 the “PortTalk” program was used to circumvent the parallel port issue, but the winkeyer will render that workaround moot.\u00c2 For handling packet cluster and skimmer merges, the wintelnetx program by K1TTT was installed.\u00c2 Wintelnetx is relatively easy to configure after the “route” settings are understood, and K1TTT has sample ini files included which make it easy to get started.\u00c2 This tutorial for TR is helpful.<\/p>\n
With wintelnetx configured to pull spots from the normal spot network and from N4ZR’s skimmer node, the band maps are populated in […]<\/p>\n
Continue reading 2010 CQ WPX CW As NR3X<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1565"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1574,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions\/1574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w4kaz.com\/qth\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}