Ohio QSO Party
Call: W1NN/M
Operator(s): W1NN
Station: W1NN
Class: Mobile Power: LP
QTH: OH
Operating Time (hrs): 12
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs
---------------------------------------------
80: 46 0
40: 404 206
20: 53 15
15: 18 5
10: 5 1 CW Mults Ph Mults
---------------------------------------------
Total: 526 227 70 61 = 164,929
Club:
Comments:
I had been looking forward to this year's OQP for quite a long time. In part
this was because I did rather badly last year and I wanted another crack at
this event. In addition, I have been spending most of my time in Japan and I
have missed a lot of my favorite contests this year. I was hungry for a
contest! (My last contest was the MQP in April.)
My miserable performance last year was in large part due to poor preparation.
I choose to drive in from my home in EPA on Saturday morning. Bad decision.
It is a five hours' drive to the Ohio border and another 1.5 hours to where I
wanted to start the contest at 12 noon. I just barely made it but I still
needed to set up and I was already tired out. On top of this, I had major
route problems during the second half of the contest so that I was spending too
long in each county with few stations to work. My results were a lot less than
I had hoped.
For various reasons, my practice in recent years has been to operate these
mobile contests by myself, and my results have been reasonably good. But I
realized that with the level of competitors that the OQP and the MQP have been
fielding (K8CC, K8MR, KU8E, W8AV, K8AQM, etc.), I had little chance of really
competing as a one-man operation. Thus, a month or so before the contest I
asked Jim K8MR if he knew anyone who would be willing to drive for me. Jim
apparently twisted some arms and got John AC8E to volunteer for the job. John
stuck by his decision to join me even after I warned him about my car: a 1986
Chevy Caprice wagon with 163,000 miles on it. A brave man, that John.
I have been using this car in the PA QSO Party and other mobile events since
around 1988. For about ten years, it was used as a multi-multi mobile, with me
driving and operating one rig in the front seat and my partner Larry N2AZS
operating a second station in the back of the car in the third seat. The car
is equipped with two main antennas: a Texas bug catcher mounted on a trailer
hitch behind the car and a Hustler three-antenna array on a magnet mount on top
of the roof. The bug catcher is a monster nearly 14 feet high with a large
inductor in the middle and a 24" capacitor hat on top of that. It is a royal
pain to put together and tune but once tuned properly it is more broad banded
than a regular hamstick or Hustler and I believe that it performs slightly
better. It is especially good on 80, although I only used it on 40 in this
contest. The Hustler array on the roof uses a triangular mount to hold
resonators for 20, 15 and 10. This is mounted at the top of a 54" Hustler
mast. It is extremely top heavy so I guy it with string from the ends of the
front bumper. When things are working correctly, I can instantly QSY on CW
among four bands. That can be very useful, although the flare really reduced
the usefulness of this ability this year. When everything is installed, the
car looks like something the CIA might have used outside the Soviet Embassy in
1955, and it gets a lot of strange looks.
Preparation is everything in one of these contests. Since I use this car as my
everyday vehicle, I have to re-install everything each time I want to operate a
contest. This usually means taking off all of the grounds and sanding away all
of the accumulated rust, cleaning the battery terminals (I have two batteries),
and similar jobs. I had planned to take the week before the contest to get
everything ready, but other things came up and I didn't get started until
Thursday evening. After a very tiring day, I was finally ready to depart for
Ohio at 5 PM on Friday night. It was 11 PM by the time I pulled into my hotel
in Wadsworth, Ohio. This was only 30 minutes away from John's place in Medina.
I still had not tested out the antennas or hooked up the rig, but at least I
was in place with all my gear ready to be set up the next morning.
I made it to John's at 8:30 AM and he helped me get the antennas ready. The
bug catcher was a little fussy but John was able to get it working well after a
little messing with the ground. We tuned it to resonate around 7125, roughly
midway between the phone and CW bands. This meant having to use the antenna
tuner for both modes. In retrospect, we probably should have tuned it for the
CW portion of the band so I could have run it without the tuner on CW. The
Hustlers were tuned for CW, allowing me to QSY on CW at the touch of the band
switch. I had to use the tuner for SSB operation on these bands. The ideal
setup would permit instant QSYing to any band and mode without any kind of
retuning, but I am not there yet. The rig, by the way, is the original rig I
bought for mobile operation back in 1987: a Yaesu 757GXII. It still works just
fine.
The station was set up on a wooden table that occupies about 1/3 of the space
in the far back of the car. The third seat faces to the rear but the table
faces to the side. It's 3' x 2' area provides a perfect operating space for
the equipment but the operator has to sit sideways on the seat, facing out the
driver's side of the car. Doing this for 12 hours in a car with very tired
springs and shocks proved to be very exhausting. Fortunately I don't suffer
from seasickness but it definitely was rough on my posterior. But it was so
nice to leave the driving and navigating to John and be able to focus entirely
on operating. It's going to be rough going back to single operation from the
front seat.
We were slightly late getting to our starting point in Licking County so I
actually began the contest in Knox. Things got off to a reasonable but not
spectacular start, and I managed to put about 33 contacts in the log during the
first half-hour. I was on 40 SSB when the flare struck at 1635Z. I said to
John that either we had something wrong with the antenna or that we had had a
flare, and it soon became obvious that it was indeed a flare. Nearly all
signals disappeared, but there were a few local Ohio stations around to work.
AF8A and KU8E were not far away so we moved through several bands and modes
since there wasn't much else to do. It probably helped that we were in the
center of the state instead of being off to the west like K8CC or to the east
like K8MR. Between 16:35 and 18:00, I worked 36 stations, all of them in
central Ohio.
But I realize now that I completely blew a fabulous opportunity that existed
while this flare depressed the bands. I should have convinced AF8A and KU8E to
move through all bands and modes (10 contacts each) and then wait while one of
us changed counties. We then work each other another ten times. Then the
other station changes counties and we work ten more times. Then I return to my
original county and we work again. Two stations each operating in two counties
can generate 40 contacts in this fashion. A third mobile adds another 40
contacts. Move to another county and convince a couple of fixed stations to
follow you through this exercise and suddenly you have a 160 Q hour in the
middle of a flare! In fact, this could be an extremely effective strategy at
any time, and I figure it is only a matter of time before lots of people are
trying this or something like it. Jim K8MR and I have discussed that 1,000
contacts are probably possible in this contest, but by using this strategy,
that number probably can be greatly exceeded.
The first out-of-state station worked after the flare was KN4Y on 15 CW at
1800. The 1800Z hour produced only 41 contacts, so the bands had not
completely recovered, but things had definitely improved. During the 1900Z
hour, the rate was up to 53 but that was still not a complete recovery. During
the second four-hour period of the contest, the rate increased to 70 per hour,
and for the final four-hour period this rose to 75, so we had a complete
recovery. I am tempted to say that SSB activity was a major factor in
achieving these totals, but I'm not sure. I did have a lot of SSB contacts
during the 2000-2359Z period (160) but only 35 SSB contacts during the last
four hours. Clearly, the ability to change counties rapidly (due to John's
steady driving) was the main factor, but increased activity this year was also
important. In this event, each active station can contribute 20-30 contacts,
so it really pays to beat the drum and get a good number of active home
stations involved. I have not done the analysis, but I'll bet that there are
20 stations that I had at least 15-20 contacts with.
>From the standpoint of the home stations, maybe one of the fun things about
this event is trying to get through the pileups that result when a mobile
changes counties. I had some tremendous rates during the five minutes after I
would change counties, and I know that was the case with all the other mobiles.
If I had been a home station, I would have enjoyed the challenge of getting
through the pileups. With five active mobiles, there are plenty of pileups to
challenge. Several times I tuned 40 CW and found K8CC, K8MR, KU8E and AF8A all
CQing at about 36-38 wpm. With each mobile changing counties every 30 minutes,
there is a lot of action for the home stations. The challenge and real
possibility of working all 88 counties is also something that keeps a lot of
home stations interested.
Although there clearly were more Ohio stations active this year - espcially on
SSB - the activity was not just from Ohio. In fact, only 35% of my contacts
were with Ohio stations. I had 64 contacts with IL stations (9% of the total)
and 43 contacts with PA stations (6%). Other states high on the list are MI,
FL, MD, VA, MA WV and GA. In some cases, it is just one station (ie AD1C or
K5IID) that accounts for almost all of the activity from a given section.
Dave mentioned that he was not able to hold a frequency on phone very well this
time. I had the opposite experience. I found it very easy to find and hold a
frequency, in contrast to my experience in PA. I think the difference is that
there is a lot more phone activity in PA due to the fact that PA is so much
better established. As the popularity of the OQP increases, it will probably
become harder and harder to hold a phone frequency. Due to the way the
multiplier works, the ability to get phone runs going is a critical skill in
this event.
Interestingly, I found that 40 phone was useable much later in the day than I
am accustomed to in PA. I'm not sure if this is a phenomenon related to the
season or whether being 500 miles further away from the European broadcast
stations is the main factor. In PA in October, I find that it is pretty much
pointless to try 40 phone much after 5 PM local. But Jim K8MR reported that he
had over a hundred phone contacts during the last 4 hours of the contest, so it
appears that the band was useable well after 8 PM local.
I chose to log on paper. This removes a potential source of noise and the risk
that RF can get into the computer. It also eliminates the potential problem of
where to put the computer and the risk that the computer will be thrown off the
table and get damaged. It was actually fun to send manually for a change, and
I really got into the rhythm of sending at 35 wpm after a while. The drawback,
of course, is that the log must be keyboarded after the contest, a rather
thankless task. For reference, I use a memory keyer to call CQ, so I am spared
that drudgery.
The weekend added another 1200 miles to the old junker. John drove around 320
miles during the contest, and another 100 miles getting to our starting point.
That's only 27 miles per hour on average during the contest, but I can tell you
that John was busy the whole time.
All in all, I really had a blast and I did a lot better than I expected,
especially in light of the first three hours. I am of course very happy to end
up on top (at least until the logs are checked), but I am aware that it was not
quite an even contest. We did not experience the kinds of debilitating rains
that the K8CC crew encountered, and, as I mentioned, it seems that the flare
may have done us less damage than it did either Dave or Jim. The fun of these
events as a mobile is that they really present a very level playing field, so
it's not much fun to win when your competitors encounter difficulties that you
do not. Hopefully next year will be a more even contest.
In the amazingly short period of three years, the OQP has already reached
critical mass, and it is clearly here to stay. With OH home stations making
over 600 contacts, that's an indication that there is real interest out there.
This is obviously due to a basically sound set of rules and the tireless
efforts of Dave K8CC, Jeff KU8E, Jim K8MR, Goose W8AV and a lot of others in
the MRRC who have worked so hard to establish and promote it. It is a great
example for others who are interested in promoting a contesting event or a
state QSO party. And I think it is also an indication that the appetite for
active, fairly short contests is nowhere near being satisfied. I'm sure that
this event will continue to grow and that in a few years people won't believe
that our scores were so low.
I'd really like to thank John Bostwick AC8E for his essential role in this
operation. John was untiring in his devotion to keeping to the route and I
couldn't have even come close without his assistance. He was the perfect
driver and companion, forcing me to stay on schedule and keeping me motivated.
We turned out to be a really good team and I sure hope we can do it again. I
would also like to thank his XYL Linda who amazingly had a full dinner waiting
for us when we got back to John's house at midnight!
73 and see you next year,
Hal W1NN
County Breakdowns
COUNTY CW PHONE
LICK 18 11
KNOX 14 1
MORR 11 9
DELA 17 3
MARI 17 4
UNIO 28 4
LOGA 26 7
SHEL 31 39
AUGL 29 2
ALLE 26 13
HARD 17 27
HANC 14 31
WYAN 16 36
SENE 36 0
WOOD 27 6
SAND 34 24
ERIE 22 0
HURO 37 0
ASHL 30 0
LORA 32 0
MEDI 34 0
Totals 516 227
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