ARRL DX SSB CONTEST
Call used: WC1M Location: NH
Category: Single Op All Band High Power Unassisted
Callsign of Operator: WC1M
______________________________________________________________________
Exchanged Information: WC1M RST NH
Hours of Operation: 15:54
band QSOs points mults
-----------------------------------
160 0 0 0
80 31 93 25 inv vee @65'
40 64 192 38 4-square
20 421 1263 86 TH7 @70'
15 358 1074 72 TH7 @70'
10 55 165 37 TH7 @70'
-----------------------------------
TOTAL 929 2787 258 SCORE: 719,046
Club or Team Name: Twin State Radio Club
Equipment: TS950SDX, Alpha 87A, FT-990, SB-221
Comments:
This was a partial effort, due to some family obligations and a deal I'm
trying to work out with the XYL: I "give up" all-out efforts for phone
contests so I get a clear shot at the big cw contests. I'm hoping she won't
find out that I really don't like phone contests all that much...
Actually, the truth is that I don't like phone contests when conditions are
crummy. In 15 years of operating, I've certainly seen worse conditions than
we had this weekend, but there was something quite lackluster about
propagation compared with this season's CQWW CW and ARRL DX CW, both of
which yielded some spectacular openings to Europe and Japan. In ARRL SSB,
Friday night was very tough. I went to bed early with less than 150 QSOs in
the log. Saturday morning started out very well, with my best hour of the
contest at 1500z on 15M: 129/hr. The next hour yielded about 110 QSOs, then
it was all downhill from there. I only had four other hours with better than
80 or so QSOs per hour. 10M was disappointing compared with the CW portion.
No big European runs this time. Essentially, all the action was on 15M and
20M. Sunday was very disappointing and got steadily worse. The A index
wasn't all that bad at 10, but the K index was jumping up as high as 5.
I guess I just don't know how to operate 40M in a DX phone contest. I did OK
trolling for mults, but never could get a split run going. I tried listening
to some big U.S. guns to see if they were doing it, but it didn't seem like
anyone was running stations or generating pileups. I'm sure it was
happening, but I couldn't find it. I probably gave up too easily -- I tried
calling a split CQ on 40M during the last 15 minutes of the contest and
actually got a couple of takers. Every time I looked at my QSO total for 40M
I thought about the hundreds of hours I spent cutting, laying and soldering
the 240 radials for the 4-square! Good thing I built it for the CW band...
80M was a little better. There's a lot more room for DX stations to fit into
that band. I didn't have a lot of QSOs, but was pleasantly surprised at how
my signal was getting out to Europe, the Caribbean and SA from my puny
inverted vee at 65'. I didn't even try to run stations split, though it
probably would have been worthwhile to spend some time at it.
Realizing that this was not going to be a 2K+ QSO contest, I spent a lot of
time trying to improve my skills at bagging mults. I paid a lot more
attention to potential band openings and found some that I had not been
aware of before. I'm sure more study in this direction will yield more
mults, but there's nothing like experiencing an unfamiliar opening it in the
heat of battle to make it sink in.
I also worked at getting used to operating with two radios, this being my
second contest with the new all-automatic antenna and rig switching system.
I was somewhat more successful at snaring mults while running stations --
some of which involves learning when *not* to pay attention to the second
radio. I also got pretty comfortable searching for mults on both radios at
the same time. But I still need a second directional antenna for the high
bands. The multiband vertical was fine until propagation tanked on Sunday.
I spent a couple of days before the contest modifying an MFJ 432 voice keyer
to work with NA from the LPT port, which involved figuring out how to add an
abort function. Thank goodness for the Internet, which yielded a complete
data sheet on the voice chip (even with that, it took some creative
experiments to find the right circuit.) Couldn't get decent audio directly
from a Heil mic, but discovered a kludge where I could feed the monitor
audio from the TS950SDX into the voice keyer and get a pretty clean
recording. Adding the 432's mic cable into my switching system introduced a
'pulsing' problem between the vox and PTT, probably due to RFI. It annoyed
me enough that I took a half hour in the middle of the contest and soldered
a couple bypass caps on the PTT lines to fix it.
The only really bothersome equipment glitch was low (500w) output from the
SB-221 on 10M. It's been fine in the CW portion, so it's probably high SWR
in the input network making the FT-990 cut power. Didn't have time to play
with it. Never noticed it before because I don't think I've ever used that
amp in a phone contest when 10M was open. The 87A was a good performer, but
at one point started tripping with an "arc" status on 10M. This has happened
on and off in contests before, but had not happened in the last year or so.
It might be related to moisture in the TH-7 10M traps (it was snowing
heavily at the time.) But I noticed that the amp seemed to lose track of my
user settings on 10M at the same time, and after I reprogrammed them the
problem went away. One of these days I'm going to figure out what the deal
is with that.
Well, I can tell I'm tired because I'm running off at the mouth and boring
all of you. Sorry. But before I go, I should say that there is one aspect of
phone contests that I do like. There's something kind of nice about hearing
a friendly voice halfway around the world laughing with you as you stumble
to say the name of your own state after many hours of non-stop contesting.
It made me smile more than once.
See you for another partial effort in SSB WPX, then hopefully a big effort
in CW WPX.
73, Dick, WC1M
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