First the numbers - then a few comments.
____________________________
So here are the raw numbers:
CQ WW RTTY Contest
Call used: 8P6SH
Location: 8P
Entry Class: Single Op, All Band
Band QSOs Pts QTH DX Zones
80 3 8 1 3 3
40 103 247 30 35 15
20 164 440 24 55 22
15 122 299 31 44 18
10 265 692 34 43 18
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Total 657 1686 120 180 76
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Claimed Score: 633936
Equipment: TS 450s, KAM, Pentium 300 (Cyrix CPU with 64megs RAM)
Antenna: Butternut HF6V - ground mounted
Software: RTTY by WF1B v4.4f
Power Output: 150
Club Participation: ARSB
"I have observed etc. etc...
Dean St. Hill
17 Ocean City
St. Philip
_____________________________
Now those comments:
This was my first real serius effort in a major RTTY contest. I had a
lot of fun with the limited resources available at my disposal for the
contest.
I have to confess that I am primarily a phone contester and in the last
couple months, getting everything ship-shape for RTTY has been quite a
challenge.
The first thing that started to do strange things was the rig, which did
not seem very happy running anything more than 40 to 50 watts, then the
station power supply would just shut down even though I'd only be
running 40 to 50 watts - how would I put out a decent signal for the
contest.
I finally realised that my problem was a "light-weight" PS which would
simply overheat and also that the TS-450 which I love to death was also
suffering from over-heating. So this was the final solution - run the
rig down between 10-20 watts and drive my Alpha 374A for 100 to 140
watts output, while running a high volume industrial grade fan across
the back of everything (I also found a busted fan in the PS)
So we finally had everything up and running by Thursday ahead of
Friday's 'test. I had recently purchased a Butternut HF6V vertical
because I have been happy with the performance of the HF2V. All contacts
during the contest were made with this HF6V which I retuned for optimum
SWR in the RTTY sub-bands.
All in all I thought it worked well. Verticals seem to work very well
from a small island like Barbados and being a mult on most bands adds a
few db to the signal no doubt. Unfortunately several stations kept
responding to my call with 8P6SM, 8P6SA (Silent Key), or 8P9SH (yes
there are some 8P6's who contest - well a couple anyway!!). It was a
pain trying to make sure they logged the correct call.
There was some good DX on all the bands. I particularly enjoyed working
KH8, JY, SV9, TY, YB, YS, VK and ZS from this location on a new mode.
(OK so some of it isn't sooo rare - but with a vertical and <150
watts??)
I also had some major problems with RTTY (the program) which on Sunday
crashed several times. I eventually noted that it only happened on 15m
and figured that I had some kind of stray RF floating around the shack
on 15m. Still it gave the error message [DPMI: Unexpected error 8009 at
03e7 057f].
So despite the few problems and a few family commitments which limited
me to about 36 hrs total operating time, you can be assured that I'll be
in there for most RTTY 'tests if only to give out a multiplier.
73, Dean - 8P6SH/8P2K
PS QSL Info: Manager is KU9C to callbook address.
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