ARRL RTTY Roundup
Call: W4PK
Operator(s): W4PK
Station: W4PK
Class: SO Unlimited HP
QTH: VA
Operating Time (hrs): 16
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
80: 208
40: 271
20: 290
15: 277
10: 127
------------
Total: 1173 State/Prov = 57 Countries = 62 Total Score = 139,587
Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club
Comments:
I use SO2R with a home-brew interface control and the latest versions of N1MM,
MMTTY and 2-Tone. My radios are IC7800 and K3/P3 (with the P3SVGA option),
both updated with the latest software.
Murphy struck multiple times during this contest.
1. Spent 4 hours Saturday afternoon trouble-shooting when I clicked on the
opposite window why it would occasionally terminate the transmission on that
radio before the message was completed. I had for years been using the classic
LPT port A/B selection for rig control. To make a long story short, I solved
this problem by abandoning (forever) the LPT control and using the RTS pins on
the two serial ports I use for FSK to key the radios.
2. Several times while in the transmit mode my K3 would quit working (ERR DSE)
and I would have to turn it off and back on to get it to work again. I think it
was due to the K3 not being able to keep up with the N1MM poling rate. This was
solved by just turning the P3 off, but I did miss the spectrum display as well
as the decoded text. I do hope that there will be a fix for this situation in
the future.
3. I use a SteppIR 3-element beam, and for some reason it developed a 2:1 VSWR
on 15M. All other bands were fine. I tried a couple of times to go through the
recalibration procedure, but to no avail. This is not solved yet.
4. I use a PW-1 with the IC7800, and the ALC control was not properly
controlling the power output under high VSWR conditions. Fortunately, I have a
spare PW-1 (but without 6M output) which I swapped out.
5. Inexplicably a couple of times I had N1MM close everything except for the
MMTTY and 2-tone windows. This happened while I was in the middle of running
stations on both radios. Two other times I had this happen was when I was in
the CONFIG menu to make a change. I was monitoring my CPU usage, and it was
always under 10%. This was using XP-Pro on a Dell Optiplex 755 dual-core
machine. I have had this happen occasionally on previous contests and I
consider it to be only a minor inconvenience. Otherwise N1MM performed
flawlessly and I do love that program!
It was a fun contest! I do apologize to all who I had left hanging when I had
the previously mentioned equipment failures. I was also overwhelmed with all
the spots and ended up hardly using any of them. I had the spot timeout set to
5 minutes but maybe it should have done something shorter.
Conditions were excellent Sunday morning to Europe on 10M and I probably spent
too much time there. During the evening hours they were also excellent on 80M
with many Europeans in the log.
73, Sam W4PK
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