ARRL 10-Meter Contest
Call: V31RG
Operator(s): K4VU
Station: V31MD
Class: SO Mixed HP
QTH: BELIZE
Operating Time (hrs): 19
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
CW: 463 78
SSB: 398 68
-------------------
Total: 861 146 Total Score = 386,608
Club: Alabama Contest Group
Comments:
When I booked this trip months ago, it was a gamble as to whether or not I would
get good -- if any -- propagation. I'm too far north to get that stream of W/VE
stations that the South Americans get. But I thought I'd give it a shot, be
optimistic and set my goals high. But as K1TO said, 'if the band is dead, at
least you can work XE's on backscatter'.
Prop was a mixed bag. There was a 3:00 a.m. opening to the southeast that no
one picked up on, but wall to wall loud beacons from TX to KY to FL littered
the space above 28.200. Then the frustration of one-way prop where the 7's
were LOUD but could not hear me. QSB was a total biatch -- S9 signals would
just fall to zero in mid callsign. Pretty frustrating. From Friday night
until Saturday afternoon I could never figure which way to point the quad -- in
fact, it didn't really seem to matter where the antenna was pointed for the
first 24 hours of the contest. Then there was the frustration of hearing a VP5
working a string of W's that I couldn't even hear (more frustration later when
all of South America was running them on Sunday afternoon -- still unable to
hear them).
But when the band did open, boy did it open. But those were few and far
between. The VK's were loud, and I nearly crapped my boxers when a VP6 called
me and gave me a 001 serial number.
Equipment wise, nearly everything that could go wrong did. A 39 cent 1/4 phono
plug from my paddle broke off in my brand spankin' new microham SO2R controller.
It took me nearly an hour to get the dang thing out of the u2r. My breakout
cable had a short in the PTT line, rendering the u2r useless on phone, forcing
me to use an old MFJ voice keyer for CQ'ing. And my trusty, 20 year old
multimeter finally bit the dust just when I needed it to try to fix the cable.
The amp kept shutting down whenever the SWR went above 1.5:1, and my Heil
headset snapped at the boom, leaving me to rewrap tape around it to hold it on
every three or so hours. And forget my first attempt at SO2R -- the second
radio developed a cooling issue the week before I got to V31 and was unusable.
But the things that should (or might) have caused issues didn't: I finally
loaded Parallels VM on my new Macbook Pro and ran N1MM and the u2r controller
without a glitch (though the Serial to USB connection going to the radio always
needed reconfiguring if I shut the computer down for some reason). So never say
you can't contest with a Mac -- in this case it ran MUCH smoother than any
windoze PC I've ever used N1MM on.
In the good new department, my buddy Chris N6WM just took the cake this year.
Two years ago, he barely knew the code and was just getting his groove into
contesting. And from N6RO's propagation making machine of a station, he
totally knocked it out of the park. Nice job, Chris.
It was great working all of my bud's in NCCC and ACG. Alabama is no longer
rare folks, by any stretch of the imagination.
Final analysis: when it was working, it was a great time. When it wasn't, it
blew. Hopefully, next year will be better -- and I will be doing it from here
again. V31 in December certainly beats the 20 degree temps in Alabama. If the
band dies, I can always just go to the beach.
73 and thanks for all of the Q's.
Robin
K4VU/V31RG
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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