[RTTY] K6IDX RTTY Roundup M/S HP

[Dean Wood <n6de@comcast.net>]

                    ARRL RTTY Roundup

Call: K6IDX
Operator(s): N6DE K6ENT
Station: K6IDX

Class: M/S HP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
   80:  128
   40:  228
   20:  458
   15:  393
   10:  110
------------
Total: 1317  State/Prov = 57  Countries = 61  Total Score = 155,406

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Comments:

I took a few pictures of the K6IDX station during the RTTY Roundup.  You 
can view them at http://public.fotki.com/n6de/k6idx/

Thanks to Brad K6IDX for inviting us to operate from his great station.

The weather forecast did not look particularly good on Thursday night 
before the contest.  Kent and I purchased chains for my Explorer early 
Friday morning in the unlikely event that we would need them to get to 
K6IDX or get home.  We departed the Bay Area Friday morning in an 
attempt to beat the bulk of the storm.  We went through HEAVY winds at 
times, and a lot of rain, but arrived at K6IDX without any problems. The 
weather all weekend was milder than I expected.  It was mostly rainy 
with light snow.  We never even remotely needed the chains.  I'm glad we 
weren't trying to drive to Reno that weekend, where they got hammered 
with several feet of snow.

We got RTTY up and running fairly quickly, and were active for the NCCC 
RTTY practice on Friday night.  After Kent installed a driver on Brad's 
Windows XP machine to support his serial port expansion card, we got rig 
control and the Hal DXP38 working simultanously.  Then the fun began. We 
spent until 2am trying to network a WindowsXP machine to a WindowsMe 
machine.  First, the challenge was getting both machines to see each 
other.  That took a while, but we solved it.  Special thanks to John 
KJ9U at W6YX who met us on 80m, gave us very helpful things to try, and 
led us to the solution.  Then the problem was getting Writelog networked 
on both machines.  We could never get Writelog networked and eventually 
gave up.  I read the networking FAQ on writelog.com, Writelog tips on 
k9jy.com, and searched the Writelog reflector for help.  I thought we 
implemented every tip we could find, but we were unsuccessful.  Maybe 
our lack of success hinged on the fact that it was 2am and our brains 
were fried.  Kent and I are both engineers in the high tech industry, 
and I work in the networking field (albeit with large enterprise level 
switches running our own OS, whereby I am able to completely avoid 
Microsoft Windows networking nonsense, thank you).  But still, if we 
struggled at this chore, it makes me wonder how frustrating it must be 
for other folks.

We had two stations set up:
Run station with IC7800, DXP38, and MMTTY
Spotting station with IC781 and MMTTY

The spotting station was of diminished value without the ability to see 
the log, but we still found a few mults with the second radio, so it was 
useful.  Once or twice, I would input several stations in the band map, 
and whenever Kent got a break on the CQing station, I would verbally 
give him a callsign to type in.  We'd then determine whether that call 
was a dupe or not by looking at the Check Call window for the band in 
question.  Repeat for next callsign.  But mostly, we ran a casual M/S 
with two guys trading seats at the run radio every few hours.  Very 
funny moment: I had spotted several stations on 15m in the bandmap, and 
was watching Kent's CQ screen for a break in the run when AB5K returned 
our 20m CQ.  I then realized I had spotted AB5K a few minutes earlier on 
15m in my band map.  Clearly, AB5K was SO2R, CQing on 15m, and was 
working us with his second radio.  I decided it would be great fun to 
surprise the hell out of AB5K and pounce on him immediately after he 
pounced on us, so we did!  I hope AB5K got as many laughs out of that as 
we did!

I was concerned that band conditions would be poor for the contest since 
the A index was 40 when the contest started.  Yet, 15m was very strong 
for us, and 10m was open to many different call areas for at least a 
couple of hours each day.  Power to the shack went out in the first hour 
of the contest.  It's a great thing that Brad has a fully automatic 
generator that kicks in within 7 seconds of a power failure, and the 
computers all have a backup UPS.  Very nice!

I hoped for at least some Europeans on 20m Sunday morning despite the 
high A index.  Usually the routine from W6 in this contest at this part 
of the sunspot cycle is to tune 20m Sunday morning, listen for fluttery 
signals Sunday morning, work as many European CQers as possible for the 
mults, and then try to call CQ to Europe with the hope that a few more 
mults will call before this short (~2 hour) opening ends.  The European 
opening that the K6IDX station produced that morning was something I 
have never experienced before from W6.  Our first European was at 1458Z. 
 OL5Q was unbelievably loud at 1523Z.  A loud SV was next a minute 
later.  None of these signals were even remotely fluttery!  I could not 
believe what I was hearing, and rapidly found a CQ frequency.  Then the 
European pileup began, with all stations sounding as if they were in W9! 
 There were so many Europeans calling that it was difficult to run 
stations quickly.  What an experience from CA!  Kent also ran Europe for 
a while.  We ended up with 124 European QSOs in the log, compared with 
144 JA QSOs.  I was very pleased with our DX mult total.  Rack it all up 
to Brad's station.

The only US mults we hadn't contacted on Saturday were MT and DC.  We 
made 4 MT QSOs on Sunday, but missed DC.  Our only Manitoba QSO was with 
VE4GH/QRP who called us in the last 30 minutes of the contest.

The IC7800 is a joy to use!  Brad had a dedicated monitor connected to 
the IC7800, so we used it as a third RTTY decoder.  It was very 
interesting to watch the RTTY decoding differences between the DXP38, 
MMTTY, and the IC7800.  They all performed well.  Sometimes the IC7800 
would copy something that both the DXP38 and MMTTY did not.  Then other 
times, MMTTY and the DXP38 would copy something that the IC7800 missed. 
 In general, they were about equal.  I was surprised that the IC7800 
RTTY decoder performed as well as it did.

Thanks to everyone for the QSOs.

73...
-Dean - N6DE




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