CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY
Call: WK6I
Operator(s): WK6I
Station: WC6H
Class: SOAB LP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 36
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Pts State/Prov DX Zones
------------------------------------------
80: 50 69 24 7 8
40: 262 543 38 40 26
20: 399 834 45 81 32
15: 261 549 37 39 24
10: 11 27 2 5 6
------------------------------------------
Total: 983 2022 146 172 96 Total Score = 837,108
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
Great station! Great time!
Rich WC6H has a very nice station in Burson in Calaveras County. He's
got a 112 foot tower with 2el on 40 and 6el on 20, with two C3s fixed
on EU further down the tower. A second tower has monobanders on 15 and 10.
I showed up with my two FT1000Ds and my special RTTY computer (just a
windows box with two soundcards and a bunch of Real Serial Ports), and
amazingly everything worked. After filling his table with two monster
radios and a computer, there was no room for amps so I went low power.
Rich's incredibly quiet location, coupled with my rigs modified with
INRAD filters made receiving a joy. I had just installed the new
roofing filters from INRAD - all I can say is that the difference is
night and day: before, I could be seriously bothered by messy stations
many KHz away - during this contest this seldom occurred!
I hadn't done low power RTTY contesting for a little while and I had
forgotten about how you have to grind out the QSOs. I did get a few
runs going but I did quite a lot of parallel S&P: make a contact on
one rig while lokking for the next contact on the other.
Many EU stations had a warbly quality to their signals which I might
normally attribute to auroral conditions, but the low solar activity
levels wouldn't seem to support that notion. With many of these
stations, they would print OK but not deflect the S-meter and I would
have a lot of trouble getting them to hear me.
Especially cool DX worked: V51/DJ4SO, 7X0RY, 7Z1SJ, PZ5RA, A61AJ,
JT1CO, ET3TK. I was amazed to find no pileups with most of these - I
guess not many others could hear them... Five banders were only HC8N
and K1TTT.
I have noticed that there is a moment early sunday in a WW where you
look at your score and you can't imagine how it can get much bigger
and you just want to pack it in and get some sleep. Rich came in with
a printout of the 3830 scores from last year and showed me where I was
at relative to last years scores (which was pretty good). That really
helped me focus and I feel like it helped me achieve a higher score.
By around mid-day sunday both 15 and 20 really got rolling for me and
I took the attitude that every point was worth it and was working
everything I could find. I usually wait for the last hour or two to do
that - but I think this time in this contest it was right and really
made a difference. I set a goal on sunday of getting over 800K plus 2%
for LCRs, and managed to do that and a little bit more.
I really want to thank Rich and his wife for their great hospitality
and help this weekend - I really had a great time!!!
- jeff wk6i
--
Jeff Stai jds@twistedoak.com
Twisted Oak Winery http://www.twistedoak.com/
Rocketry Org. of CA http://www.rocstock.org/
Amateur Radio WK6I ~ Calaveras County, CA ~ WI6NE
40th Annual California QSO Party! ~ Oct 1-2, 2005 ~ http://www.cqp.org/
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