ARRL Sweepstakes, SSB
Call: N5XU
Operator(s): W5JLP, KB5LBN, KM5TY, N8DVM, K5PI, WM5R
Station: N5XU
Class: Multi-Op
QTH: STX
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band QSOs
-------------------------------
160: 0
80: 10
40: 95
20: 321
15: 566
10: 232
-------------------------------
Total: 1224 x 80 = 195,840
Club: CTDXCC
Comments:
Station:
http://n5xu.ae.utexas.edu/n5xu/
Kenwood TS-850SAT
Heathkit SB-220
Force 12 C-4 @ 100', rotatable
40M wire dipole @ 85', fixed N-S
80M wire dipole @ 85', fixed N-S
Optimus PRO-50MX headset
W9XT Contest Card
TR Log 6.59
This was a fun contest. We had more operators than we had for CW: four
students, one staff member, and an alumnus who showed up late Saturday night
for a bit. This was the first phone Sweepstakes for one of our operators,
and the first contest ever for another of our operators. Together, those
two operated for probably six hours in total. Two of our other operators
are not really phone contesters, but did a great job and were enthusiastic.
We had a slow start on Saturday this year. Last year, the first five hours
of the contest yielded over 500 QSOs - this year, just 345. The first two
hours, in particular, were disappointing. We started on 15 with a nice clear
frequency for about 15 minutes before people crowded in on us big time, and
it became painful. Some years, we get lucky and can maintain a good frequency
for a few hours. Other years, we get squeezed by the big guns on either
coast. Our tribander does not effectively cover both coasts at once, and
when we're beaming to one or the other, we tend to get stations on the opposite
coast trying to slide closer to us. We lost ground throughout the rest of
the evening, and were a little under 200 QSOs behind last year's running
total by 0600 UTC. We were able to make up some ground on Sunday sporadically,
only to fall behind again. This year, we had more Sunday hours in the 20's
and 30's, where last year we had 30's and 40's, so we ended up roughly 200
QSOs behind at the end. We had a couple of really decent Sunday hours,
though - 2000 UTC was our third best hour of the contest, with 81 QSOs.
I had a lot of fun that hour.
Working a clean sweep this year wasn't a problem. I think we ended up being
called by stations from all but WTX, which wasn't hard to find. The last
section we worked was PAC, and one of the last was AB. I still don't
understand why Alberta was so absent this year in both the CW and phone
contests. There are big cities with lots of hams there!
In the hours I operated, I noticed two trends.
I noticed a lot more stations using voice keyers for large parts of the
exchange in addition to, say, calling CQ. The worst sounding ones used
little tiny voice files for each individual number in the serial number,
and sounded like some sort of badly implemented automatic telephone credit
card system. I just don't understand why people want to sound that bad.
But that wasn't the only problem. I don't know if they're all using stuff
they recorded last year, or if it was recorded on a different microphone
or what, but there were many stations that would give me a number in their
real voice and then (what sounded like) an entirely different voice would
give me the rest of the exchange. I know it was the same person, but the
sound was _so_ different that it was really jarring and took real effort
to recover and get everything the first time. Sometimes the precedence was
cropped badly, and I had to ask for a repeat. Why do these people handicap
themselves this way?
On the other hand, our handicap was our check number. There were times
when literally 50% of the stations that called us asked us to confirm our
check, and it was not because of QRN or QRM. This was noticeably higher
than last year.
It looks like the number of college and university clubs participating might
actually be a little higher than last year. If it is higher,
it could be the first time since the ARRL introduced the School Radio
Club category four years ago, and college and university club participation
fell in one year by nearly 50%. At least 28 colleges and universities were
heard on the air this year (only 18 entered the phone competition last year)
and there may be more activity reports to come. Maybe everyone who despised
the League for the way they handled it has graduated? Still, several college
and university clubs (ours included) continue to boycott the SRC category
and enter in the Multi-op category.
I think I might want to do this contest as a single-op sometime.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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