CQWW WPX Contest, SSB
Call: WV1K
Operator(s): W1TJL N1IXF K1EBY K1NYK K2GAV
Station: W1TJL
Class: M/S HP
QTH: FN32na
Operating Time (hrs): 42.3
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 9
80: 162
40: 345
20: 553
15: 817
10: 260
------------
Total: 2146 Prefixes = 959 Total Score = 5,283,131
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
While we approached this contest a bit more casually and couldn't due to other
commitments make the typical "all out" 48 hour commitment, it was
really great this contest to have a few other Central CT Contesters help out
with our MS entry. In addition to Tom, W1TJL and Rich, N1IXF, we had Frank,
K1EBY pull the over night shift the first night with Dave, K1NYK and Ted, K2GAV
coming to provide help on Sunday afternoon. Tom, N1MM was unable to make it so
his loss (as you'll see below). Unfortunately, the New England potholes, (they
are the worst ever after this hard winter), busted one of the rear springs on
Frank's Dodge Durango as he drove home to get some sleep. While he was able to
make it home limping along at 15 MPH, Frank was unable to come back the second
night and we really missed him. With Dave and Ted joining us on Sunday
afternoon, we had a good time socializing while taking turns operating.
Special thanks to Susan, W1TJL's wife, for providing the team with triple fudge
brownies, homemade caramel corn and chocolate/butter/nut candy brickel. Our
blood sugar went through the roof. :-) We also had some healthy stuff too but
who remembers that... Tom, N1MM, you missed out on that Triple Fudge crack you
enjoyed so much!
We thought the first 24 hours of this contest were the toughest propagation
wise - our experience seems to be very different than some our competitors so
we'll have to do a bit of log analysis to see what we can learn from that. At
the start we couldn't get much of anything going as the Europeans all worked
each other and S&P was slooooow. The band noise the first night was
horrendous, especially on 40M. There was a line of thunderstorms off the coast
so it was VERY noisy. Played with settings for IPO and RF gain but listening
was still painful.
As in ARRL DX SSB, it was a bummer that 10M never really provided much. There
were lots of spots that we couldn't even hear and most of what we did hear was
weak signals. Surprisingly though even thopugh the signals were weak to us the
stations came back first call most of the time and we often heard comments about
strong signal, etc. So lesson learned, try anyway...
Sunday morning provided some great runs on 20 and 15, at one point while
beaming/working EU we were getting 59+10 signal reports from the W6's in CA -
while at that same time, but for the occasional 5 call area, we didn't hear
many other stateside stations.
Tom noticed several time that long path propagation to VK and ZL was surprising
strong. But at the same time Europe (especially northern Europe) was weak and
fluttery. Early evening Saturday we had propagation to JA on all 3 of the
higher bands, 10, 15 and 20 and 40 to boot.
A real plus to close out the contest was a very productive 40M run that Tom and
Dave had late Sunday - especially after the poor showing from 40 all weekend.
IN fact it was our most productive run of the weekend.
While the FT-5000MP worked flawlessly, we had problems with the logging
computer randomly crashing throughout the weekend. Don't think the issue is
related to N1MM Logger+ but rather the machine itself. Making matters worse, a
couple of the crashes required an actual reboot of the PC (which makes me think
something had caused a hardware issue. And the 3rd whammy was that when N1MM+
came back up the remembered window positions, font settings, personalization
had been lost so we were all back to Tom's settings. 2 other PCs running at
the same time with N1MM+ all networked together never had the slightest glitch.
And this all on a PC that has been flawless for a couple of years as the main
shack logging PC. Murphy.
Kudos to our fellow YCCCers at K6ND and NQ2F and the impressive score from
K0DU. Wish that more stations posted scores to cqcontest.net as it's fun (and
it pushes us!) to keep an eye on how others are doing in our category.
Thanks to all for all the contacts and look forward to doing it again next
year!
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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