After a bit of schedule thrashing, we settled on a route very similar
to last year's Disaster Rove. The changes turned out to be unnecessary
but things worked out fairly well anyway.
On Saturday we started out on Mohawk Mountain in FN31it, and
conditions were decent with steady business for most of the 2 hours we
were there. A long drive from there to Alamuchy verified that going
through Poughkeepsie and the Mid-Hudson and down I87 is faster than
going down US7 and across I84 even though it's a touch longer. We got
to Alamuchy just after dark and about an hour behind schedule, so we
decided to cut that stop short and proceed to Pismire Ridge in FN10
before it got too late. Along the way we hit a big pothole on I80 and
the logging computer shut down. Andy attempted to reboot only to get
an ominous slow beeping out of it. Dissassembly showed that the memory
had evidently popped out of it's socket from the shock, and reseating
the memory allowed the machine to boot again .. but evidently when the
memory popped out we managed to trash the system enough that it would
not come back up as a multi-head box. The first hour at Pismire had
Andy working guys on low bands while I frantically tried to get
multi-head up again .. I ended up getting it to run in single head
which at least gave us one logging computer, and worked as many of the
microwave stations that had waited through that period. We called it a
night around 1AM and headed for a hotel in Hazleton for 4 hours of
sleep.
Sunday morning we had an hour's drive to Camelback, and Andy managed
to get RL running on his laptop and networked with the single-user
system that remained of the original logging box which gave us 90% of
our capabilities back (only computer control of rotator couldn't be
fixed). Camelback was fogged in and we weren't sure if the Grid
Rangers were going to be up there, but the top was empty and
conditions were still pretty good and we had mostly worked everyone
that was around by the time we yielded to NN3Q/R around 10:30. Another
long drive to Big Mountain where we were expecting to find a limited
multiop effort from K8EP but actually found an empty mountaintop and
typical conditions for that site. Finally one more long drive to
Hogback on Skyline Drive where we spent about an hour working guys to
the south and then moved up to the top only to find a nice big storm
over the metro DC area that made for mediocre conditions and many
shut-down locals.
Overall the radios all worked excellently and we could mostly work
anyone we could hear. The SDR-IQ bandscope has been invaluable, and
the GPS-locked synthesized LO system is working perfectly. I've still
got a bit of inter-station interference remaining even after moving my
IF to 145, but it was only a problem for extrememly weak signals and
mostly when the front 2M antenna was pointing directly toward the
microwave mast.
We did just slightly better than our previous best score in September
2009 .. thanks to all of the participating stations
RoverLog QSOs by Activated Grid:
Grid QSOs Grid QSOs Grid QSOs
FM09 18 FN31 122 FM19 101
FN10 101 FN20 49 FM08 189
FN21 180
RoverLog Score Summary, Using new rules:
Band QSOs Value QPts Mults
50 130 1 130 25
144 175 1 175 28
222 111 2 222 25
432 130 2 260 26
902 51 3 153 11
1.2G 56 3 168 11
2.3G 33 4 132 9
3.4G 28 4 112 8
5.7G 23 4 92 7
10G 23 4 92 6
Grids activated: 7
Totals: 760 1536 163
Claimed Score: 250368
de w1rt/john
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