Perhaps a new category: insanity!!
73, Kim - WG8S
> On 06/13/2023 12:26 PM CDT k3sk@buckwalter.co mailto:k3sk@buckwalter.co wrote:
>
>
> A little reading entertainment for you...
>
>
> Sometimes You Just Need to Keep at It - No Matter What
>
> While getting ready to submit my VHF Contest logs, I ran into a dilemma I
> had not considered before. Was my category 'Single Operator' or 'Multi
> Operator'? All along I had prep'd and planned to be 'Single Operator'. But
> about an hour into the contest an acquaintance I had not operated with for
> many years showed up. I did not invite him and was not thrilled at all
> when he appeared. My hope was that his stay would be brief, and his
> interruptions would be minor. However, that was not to be. Apparently,
> Murphy was going to spend the entire contest plaguing my participation.
>
> The first issue Murphy entertained me with was about an hour after the
> contest started. I was intermittently losing receive signals through my
> mast mounted 2m preamp, which then progressed to both loss reception of all
> 2m signals and high SWR on transmit. After determining the problem was
> definitely up on the tower, I went out and lowered the crank-up tower down
> and moved my man-lift (yes, I have a man-lift) into place and went to take a
> look. I pretty quickly determined a perfectly good DPDT coaxial relay was
> stuck in the half-way changed position, leaving both TX and RX open from the
> antennas and preamp. The mechanical "contact "pusher" that the magnetic
> coil pulls in was rubbing against the mount and had gotten stuck there.
> Without success I tried to adjust it by loosening the screws and wiggling it
> around. When that didn't work, I went to my spare parts pile ang took a
> coil and "pusher" off of a spare relay and swapped it out. That solved the
> problem. By the time I was done and had the tower back up and was again
> operating, I had lost about an hour and 30 minutes.
>
> After that I was able to get in a good 3 hours or so of operating until
> Murphy messed with the settings I was using for Digirite. Digirite is not
> really a good program, it's kludgy and very hard to configure, and I don't
> like it much, but it's the only thing that interfaces directly with
> Writelog, my contesting software. Digirite's only advantage is the ability
> to dupe check digital QSOs before they are worked. Murphy had done a good
> job of screwing it up and I was not able to get it going again, so I
> switched over to running multi-instances of WSJT-X and accepted the fact
> that I would have dupes in my log. I lost another hour or so of operating
> time with this minor interruption.
>
> Things settled down, everything was working perfectly, and I was plugging
> along making contacts and filling the log, . . . . . . for 3-1/2 hours.
> Then without any warning, WSJT-X stopped working, all instances of it, on
> all 3 radios at once. Murphy had gotten into my computer and had somehow
> deleted all, I mean all, of my sound card device settings. I had no audio
> to or from any of the radios to WSJT-X. By this time almost all of the
> contest was taking place using digital modes and without WSJT-X I was out of
> the game. Fortunately, I know how to quickly set up WSJT-X sound and
> thought this was going to be a quick fix. I couldn't have been more
> wrong. I could not get Windows 11 to recognize any of the external sound
> card interfaces (IC-9700 built-in & 2 separate Signallink units). The
> computer indicated that they "just were not there". I was lost. I
> rebooted the computer more times than I could count. I tried to reinstall
> drivers, that didn't work either. I unplugged and plugged the USB
> connections, with no success. I even reinstalled WSJT-X, which did nothing.
> Finally, I shut everything down and unplugged the computer and went for a
> cup of coffee. When I returned and turned everything back on, all of the
> sound card devices were there! Apparently, power off clears faults and
> detects devices when a computer restart or reboot does not. I had to reset
> all of the device mapping and parameters and was finally back on the air
> after another 3-1/2 hours of lost operating time.
>
> As 2AM local time approached I was eagerly anticipating switching over to
> EME to grab some needed multipliers. Lots of other contesters had the same
> idea. The chat boards were full of people arranging and scheduling contacts
> on all 3 bands I was planning on as well. This was going to be great.
> That was until Murphy, remember Murphy? He woke up from his nap and
> tweaked my WSJT-X settings. Well, that's what I think, but have still not
> resolved the issue he created. Before the contest I was doing ok making
> EME contacts on 2m and 432, and with some difficulty I was succeeding on 222
> as well. But since the earlier rebuilding of the entire WSJT-X suite,
> including sound input & output configurations, I have not copied a single
> signal off of the moon. I even went out to the yard in the dark to see if
> the moon was there and if my antennas were pointed at it. Both the moon
> was where it was supposed to be, and the antenna array was pointed directly
> at it. I receive chat board messages reporting reception of my transmitted
> signals, but I cannot see or copy anything from anyone. This makes no
> sense at all. Terrestrial with FT8 works fine using the exact same hardware
> and software. So, after 2-1/2 hours of zero contacts I gave up the EME
> effort and lowered the elevation back to ground level.
>
> The timing was good for going back terrestrial. 432 and even 1296 was
> open. I was hearing a New England station (~500 miles) on 1296 CW at 599!
> But for some reason my CW key was not keying the transmitter. As the signal
> faded into the noise over the next 6 or 7 minutes, I realized that WSJT-X
> had put my IC-9700 into 'split' mode and even after changing the mode to CW,
> the TX VFO was still in 'Data' mode. I'll blame this lost 3-point contact
> and new multiplier loss on operator error. Murphy had nothing to do with
> it.
>
> Things had settled, the sun was rising and even though I was still bum'd
> about the EME failure, I was slowly racking up points on all bands when both
> 2m and 432 SSPA's shut down. The panel lights were out, this could only
> mean Murphy had screwed with a power supply. Not to worry. I had a spare.
> I quickly swapped in the spare, but neither came back on! Ok, now what?
> Maybe Murphy had screwed with my 3D printed 50V distribution block. So, I
> unplugged both amps from it and hooked them to a Y connection I had. This
> didn't change anything. Neither amp still worked. I was baffled, Murphy
> had gotten trickier. My next move was to connect only one amp at a time.
> The 2m amp did not come on, so I tried the 432 amp, and it came on. This
> was progress. Not a good sign, but at least progress. I need the 2-meter
> amp to work. Next, I pulled the power cord from the back of the 2m amp and
> saw that there was black soot and some melted plastic on it. This did not
> give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. The amp had been performing well so I
> assumed (hoped) it was ok. I took the power cord to the work bench and
> opened up the connector. The internal + and - pins had shorted together
> where the plastic had melted. I did not have another of these weird Russian
> DC connectors that the amp uses, so I cleaned up the soot and cut strips of
> thin Teflon sheeting and put it in where the plastic had melted to keep the
> + and - pins from shorting. This fixed the issue. Murphy had been
> defeated again and I was back in business with only about 40 minutes of lost
> time.
>
> By now it was getting into late Sunday morning, and I had been up since 5AM
> on Saturday. That's a long time without sleep when you are 71 years old.
> But that didn't matter. I was making contacts, slowly, but I was making
> them. I even snagged a few new grids on 6 and 2-meter MSK. Sometime
> later, after my second or third unscheduled 10 minute nap in front of the
> radios wearing my head set, I decided I need to go lay down and sleep for an
> hour or so.
>
> Five hours later I woke up and was back at the radio to find not only
> 6-meters hopping, but a 2-meter sporadic E opening to the southwest. I
> don't know how much of it I had missed, but this was great. Lots of
> contacts and new multipliers, and no sign of Murphy. After the 2 -meter Es
> died down I was jumping from band to band and rotating antennas all
> directions picking up points and multipliers. By this time in the contest
> there was almost no SSB activity, and most of my contacts were FT8 with the
> occasional 432 or 1296 CW contact thrown in.
>
> With only about 2 hours of the contest remaining I was feeling pretty good.
> Then he struck again! Except for most digital, I operate wearing a Heil
> Proset Plus that I got for my birthday about 15 years ago. Because I haven't
> done a lot of CW for years my code copying pretty much sucks, and I always
> copy wearing headphones. Well to challenge me, for his last act Murphy
> decided break an internal conductor in the headset cord to turn the audio in
> my left year on and off at random. This was quite annoying but at this
> point I was not going to stop and fix it.
>
> To wrap up this rambling saga, I go back to my initial dilemma. Was my
> operating category 'Single Operator' or 'Multi Operator'? Since Murphy
> didn't work or log any contacts and only provided challenging entertainment
> for most of the entire contest, I think I'll go with my planned 'Single
> Operator' category.
>
> Now to find out why I'm not seeing or decoding EME modes from WSJT-X.
>
> de K3SK FM07
>
>
>
>
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