North American QSO Party, RTTY - July
Call: K6DAJ
Operator(s): K6DAJ
Station: W6YX
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: Stanford, CA
Operating Time (hrs): 10
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
80: 31 11
40: 192 44
20: 309 47
15: 57 19
10: 12 8
-------------------
Total: 601 129 Total Score = 77,529
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Team: NCCC Team #1
Comments:
Operating at the Stanford Amateur Radio Club (W6YX) station takes me back forty
years because everything about it--the pastoral open fields and birds, the heavy
metal building and furniture, even the olafactory experience--reminds me of the
Stanfod-owned "DC Power Lab" (named after Mr. Power!) on Arastradero
Road in Palo Alto, where I worked and lived during my graduate studies. (It
housed the Stanford A.I. Lab, and computer music group. It was torn down in the
late 1980s; the site is now a horse farm.) Special thanks to Mike N7MH for
showing me the ropes and letting me use his personal K3's.
I came down on Friday to get everything set up and tested, which was a good
move; even so, there were a few glitches worked out in the hour before the
contest. I loved using the twin K3s. It would have been really nice to have had
a third radio dedicated to 10m, but it was hard enough just getting everything
set up for *two* radios. I used a separate RTTY tone for each, which worked
great. . . the trick was to figured out that the difference (in terms of musical
intervals) was a Major 6th!
As many will likely report, 10m was wide open at the start and I spent the first
hour on 10m/15m. I mined 10m for mults and did some CQing, but it took time and
there weren't enough stations. 15m was disappointing, and by the end of the
first hour, my Q total was low so I decided I could no longer afford to spend
time on 10, and switched to 20/15. I did feel like I didn't "play" 10
and 15 as well as I should have. By 20:15z 15m was fading and I took a break.
One of the great strengths of the W6YX station is the large selection of
antennas. This enabled me to have two radios on 20m for several hours, each with
its own Yagi, with practically no interference between them. This was when I
finally found my stride. Lafter (after breaks and a period of doing 20m/40m), I
did the same trick on 40m with the Yagi and the inverted-V. Again, this worked
very well. As for 80m, I went there at sundown (0330z) and mostly worked only
W. Coast with a few further east. Heard several stations (Ohio, for example) on
the Beverage, but they couldn't hear me. Frustrating not to find more mults on
80m. Ended at 10:30PM local time.
My goal in this contest was modest. Last year's summer RTTY NAQP was my first
attempt at SO2R and I've gotten much more comfortable with it since then. So I
wanted to beat my last year's QSO total and score, and I did do so, but only by
10K. Although I made 130 more Qs this year, I had 14 fewer mults, mainly due to
anemic performance on 10/15. Of course, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison,
as I was operating at a different station last year (N6RO).
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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