IARU HF Championship 1996
Call: SL0CB Country: Sweden
Category: Multi Single
Operators: SM0GNU (SSB), SM0TXT (CW) and Norton Utilities for DOS
BAND QSO QSO-PTS PTS/Q ZONES HQ STNS
160 23 39 1.70 3 11
80 87 231 2.66 7 15
40 278 878 3.16 20 16
20 816 2996 3.67 37 17
15 364 1160 3.19 21 15
10 346 1226 3.54 15 16
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Totals 1914 6530 3.41 103 90
Score: 1,260,290 points
Equipment
Rig : IC765
PA : Alpha
Ant : 10-40m - 4 ele HyGain Explorer 14 @18m
80m - Vertical with some 40 radials
160m - dummyload-dipole
Conds were way out of the ordinary! Not that often one can
work USA on 10m between 1930-2130z (=2130-2330 local)! No
big W6-opening on 20 during sunday-morning though and we only
managed to work 5 of the WRTC-teams (W6E/W6H/K6S/K6M/AH3D).
So, how did Norton get involved in this? Well..when we were
at about 1600QSO's into the contest, the 286 we were logging
on started taking an awful long time for dupe-checking and re-
gistering, so we decided to switch the logging over to a lap-
top 486 that was available. Said and done, five minutes later
the logging was fast and smooth again and we were happy.
Two hours later we noticed that the iaru.cty-file in the laptop
must be older than the one in the 286 since some countries
were bad and they hadn't been that on the other computer, soo..
what to do? Simply take the iaru.cty from the 286 and copy it
into the laptop. Quick and easy. We thought. Somehow did we
manage not only to copy the iaru.cty-file over to the laptop,
but also the two hour older iaru.bin-file....oooh no! Two hours
and some 150 QSO's lost! Luckily there were no priest around,
had there been, his ears would have melted.
A bunch of banging the computer and curses later we were about
to call it quits when I came up with an idea..ta-da - the logfile
was overwritten, but since the other file was bigger there must
still be fragments left of it on the HD. Enter Norton Utilities
for DOS and his DISKEDIT. Ulf/GNU took the computer with him home
to search for it while I continued the contest on the 286 with
my fingers crossed. 45 minutes later he returned with the
laptop and a smile! He found the lost QSO's! Thank you, Peter
Norton! All that remained was to merge the log-differences
together, but that could wait until after the contest.
Otherwise, a very pleasant contest. Biggest surprise after the
10-meter-openings was working W1AW/3 at 0704z on 15m CW while
beaming Japan, signals sure travel strange paths sometimes..
/Torgny - SM0TXT
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