CQ WW RTTY WPX Contest
Call: P49X
Operator(s): W0YK
Station: P40L/P49Y
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: FKal52
Operating Time (hrs): 30
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
80: 516
40: 962
20: 535
15: 1271
10: 575
------------
Total: 3859 Prefixes = 973 Total Score = 15,522,269
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
What a great contest weekend! The solar activity was optimum for a WPX contest
and activity was high. Thanks to all participants for making it enjoyable for
everyone. It seemed to me that folks were having a good time.
Because one can become stale and complacent repeating the same thing
year
after year, I try to find new ground to cover in each contest. I probably got
a bit aggressive in that regard this time. There were three goals I set for
2013 WPX RTTY:
1. Beta-test K3 DSP firmware 2.81 which adds a narrow filter around the FSK
transmitted signal. This results in significantly less bandwidth which is a
benefit to everyone else on the band due to less interference to nearby
signals. The flip-side is that other signals can operate closer to narrower
signals, but if they themselves are still wide, then the â??good guyâ?? gets
QRMâ??ed more. Besides this worry, the firmware medication may have broken
something else.
2. Evaluate the new 2Tone RTTY decoder created by G3YYD. There has been a
lot
of favorable, but anecdotal, praise of it and I wanted to see what difference
it made in contest conditions. I did try it out at home in the BARTG Sprint
and FMRE RTTY contests the past two weeks.
3. Item 2 requires N1MM Logger and I use WriteLog for RTTY contesting.
This is
a big deal from a learning-curve perspective because I have thousands of contest
hours under my belt with WriteLog. I can operate N1MM Logger just fine, but
setting up SO4V (SO2V on each of two SO2R radios), callsign stacking and
networked Single-Op (a networked PC per radio) is a real challenge for any
logger, particularly one I have little experience with.
I pursued this path up until 12 hours before the contest and then decided that
I was not yet proficient enough with advanced N1MM Logger operation (item 3),
and retreated by to my familiar WriteLog configuration. It was a hard decision
because I found a lot of wonderful things in N1MM Logger and my experience in
the BARTG and FMRE contests showed that the 2Tone decoder offered substantial
advantages in a small percentage of marginal receive situations. There were a
few times with the 2Tone decoder gave perfect copy when MMTTY and the Hal DXP38
did not. The tipping point was my pre-contest warmup operating on Thursday
where I had far too many â??surprisesâ?? with N1MM Logger. (The opposite was
also true, but having all three decoders covers a larger share of QSOs.) I
suspect most of my N1MM Logger issues were self-inflicted, but the simple truth
was that I would likely have a miserable and frustrating weekend with it instead
of my battle-tested WriteLog setup. So this abandonment reduced my risk of new
things from 3 to 1, but of course I didnâ??t know what unforeseen surprises
would await me prior to and during the contest.
The 19th annual event was my 7th straight WPX RTTY operation from this QTH.
Normally, I arrive 4-5 days ahead of the start date to allow time for the
inevitable unforeseen issues that arise. Antennas and equipment could be
broken and each contest is a unique, customized setup. Itâ??s sort of like a
Field Day operation, but with air-conditioning in the radio room. Since I had
just been here for ARRL RTTY Round-Up last month, I rationalized a later
arrival on Wednesday afternoon, just 2 days before the starting gun.
Arriving at the cottage at 4pm, I ran out to stock up on groceries, made
dinner and then set about configuring the station. Late into the night I had
the station running SO2R with N1MM Logger and a long list of issues and
concerns. With respect to N1MM Logger, I have to say that Larry K8UT, Rick
N2AMG, Iain N6ML, Hank W6SX and Dave K6LL were very gracious and patient with
my questions and problems. Emails and Skype calls were flying fast between us
as I tried to get a number of advanced features working effectively together.
Thursday morning, I arose later than usual due do a late retreat to bed
at
around 5am that morning, and found one of my K3s had no audio output and not RF
drive. The P3 bandscope showed proper signal levels, but nothing was getting
through to the audio stages needed for decoding and audio feedback. Moreover,
there was no RF drive into the final amplifier stages. An hour of
troubleshooting waiting for Elecraft Support to open up plus another hour of
talking with technicians, resulted in discovering that my field test unit had
tin-plated connectors between the DSP and RF PCBs. Simply unplugging and
re-inserting those modules cleaned the oxidation sufficiently to bring back the
DSP signal routing and the radio was fixed â?¦ until I return home and have the
connectors replaced with the current gold-plated versions. Whew! That was a
close call because I didnâ??t have a spare K3 along. Still, the attendant
anxiety sapped some energy.
Friday morning, I got cold feet with my #3 goal and bagged N1MM Logger
for
WriteLog. That took several hours of reconfiguring my three PCs and making
sure all messages, keyboard mappings, databases, etc were ready to go. I
prepared some contest food, took a nap and did some more warm-up operating.
It looked like band conditions would be similar to 2011, so I used an
hour-by-hour analysis of my operation in an Excel spreadsheet to guide me
through this one. In the end, it proved to be an accurate prediction. The low
bands were nearly as productive as two years ago and the high bands were even
better balanced with the sweet spot being 15 meters. 10 and 20 were about
equally effective, but down from 15. Had the sunspot number been substantially
higher, the high-band sweet spot would have moved up to 10 with 20 being nearly
useless, as it was in the 2011 CQ WW RTTY Contest which enjoyed the peak solar
activity of this cycle. This weekend, though, the solar activity was moderate
enough that the low bands worked well for the double-QSO-points in WPX.
Hour-by-hour, my QSO statistics tracked a bit ahead of 2011 and in the
end my
raw score was nearly 12% higher. 3% was due to higher accumulated QSO points
while 9% was due to a larger number of prefix multipliers. Iâ??d like to think
my increased proficiency at SO4V allowed me to pick off Packet-spotted mults (on
Sunday, I kept the bandmap clear of mults), but Iâ??d guess that there were more
prefixes active this time. My QSO count was up 7%, which translated to only 3%
more QSO points because of a shift from low-band 6-point QSOs to high-band
3-point QSOs. (OK, Iâ??m a bit of an analytic!)
So, Iâ??m rolling along nicely on Saturday afternoon, running pileups
on 10
and 15 at 140/hour, down from 200+/hour in the morning, when suddenly my
15-meter amplifier faults out and Iâ??ve got high SWR which looked to be an
open circuit through that side of the SixPak. I opted to take a 30-minute
break time to address the issue and get refreshed at the same time. Iâ??d had
trouble in the past with the 15m position on this side of the SixPak, but it
always resolved itself before I completed the troubleshooting. Same thing
happened again and at the end of break everything was working fine again. I
attributed it to some operator error I didnâ??t understand. This was not a
great time for a break and it undoubtedly cost me some final QSO points.
When youâ??re 29.25 hours into the 30-hour WPX RTTY Single-Op scoring period,
itâ??s a great feeling coming down the home stretch. In my case, I was clearly
ahead of my prior personal best in this contest, despite being short of 4000
QSOs that I felt were attainable in the absence of a couple interruptions to my
high run rates on 10/15 meters. Having survived the first disaster (described
above) on Saturday afternoon, I was pretty confident at this point so close to
the end. And then the second disaster occurred! A GI4 new multiplier sent me
his report, but I couldnâ??t confirm. Same thing (15m amp faulted) but this
time as I was troubleshooting on my new 30-minute break I discover that the K3
was giving an error message that 12 volts was not getting to the 100 watt
amplifier module. I chose not to start down the path to diagnose and fix that,
so I opted to move that side to 10 meters and drive the amp with the K2 12 watt
output for a whopping 250 watts out on that band. At 31 minutes, I found new
run frequencies and fired up again to finish the contest.
Thanks again to all participants. Despite my difficulties, you all made it a
great experience. As always, thanks to John W6LD/P40L and Andy AE6Y/P49Y for
sharing their Aruba cottage station. And to Sue AI6YL/P40YL and Carl AI6V/P49V
for treating me to a post-contest dinner at the local â??B55 Restaurantâ??.
Will see some of you and more in the ARRL DX CW Contest next weekend as P40L
with W6LD in another MS effort.
Ed P49X (W0YK)
Cabrillo Statistics (Version 10g) by K5KA & N6TV
http://bit.ly/cabstat
CALLSIGN: P49X
CATEGORY-OPERATOR: SINGLE-OP
CATEGORY-TRANSMITTER: ONE
CONTEST: CQ-WPX-RTTY
OPERATORS: W0YK
-------------- Q S O R a t e S u m m a r y ---------------------
Hour 160 80 40 20 15 10 Rate Total Pct
--------------------------------------------------------------------
0000 0 15 81 0 0 0 96 96 2.5
0100 0 29 99 0 0 0 128 224 5.8
0200 0 49 95 0 0 0 144 368 9.5
0300 0 44 94 0 0 0 138 506 13.1
0400 0 61 94 0 0 0 155 661 17.1
0500 0 58 70 0 0 0 128 789 20.4
0600 0 42 68 0 0 0 110 899 23.3
0700 0 41 56 0 0 0 97 996 25.8
0800 0 3 10 0 0 0 13 1009 26.1
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1009 26.1
1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1009 26.1
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1009 26.1
1200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1009 26.1
1300 0 0 0 24 33 0 57 1066 27.6
1400 0 0 0 56 86 0 142 1208 31.3
1500 0 0 0 49 101 0 150 1358 35.2
1600 0 0 0 0 101 104 205 1563 40.5
1700 0 0 0 0 107 78 185 1748 45.3
1800 0 0 0 8 76 74 158 1906 49.4
1900 0 0 0 86 72 13 171 2077 53.8
2000 0 0 0 73 63 0 136 2213 57.3
2100 0 0 0 46 42 0 88 2301 59.6
2200 0 0 0 76 87 0 163 2464 63.8
2300 0 0 0 33 39 0 72 2536 65.7
0000 0 0 29 25 0 0 54 2590 67.1
0100 0 15 58 20 0 0 93 2683 69.5
0200 0 29 43 0 0 0 72 2755 71.4
0300 0 32 43 0 0 0 75 2830 73.3
0400 0 40 49 0 0 0 89 2919 75.6
0500 0 41 43 0 0 0 84 3003 77.8
0600 0 17 30 0 0 0 47 3050 79.0
0700 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3050 79.0
0800 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3050 79.0
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3050 79.0
1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3050 79.0
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3050 79.0
1200 0 0 0 21 19 0 40 3090 80.1
1300 0 0 0 18 93 11 122 3212 83.2
1400 0 0 0 0 74 69 143 3355 86.9
1500 0 0 0 0 76 60 136 3491 90.4
1600 0 0 0 0 85 68 153 3644 94.4
1700 0 0 0 0 64 63 127 3771 97.7
1800 0 0 0 0 35 17 52 3823 99.0
1900 0 0 0 0 19 18 37 3860 100.0
2000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3860 100.0
2100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3860 100.0
2200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3860 100.0
2300 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3860 100.0
------------------------------------------------------
Total 0 516 962 535 1272 575 3860
Gross QSOs=3911 Dupes=51 Net QSOs=3860
Unique callsigns worked = 2487
The best 60 minute rate was 208/hour from 1602 to 1701
The best 30 minute rate was 216/hour from 1602 to 1631
The best 10 minute rate was 240/hour from 1602 to 1611
The best 1 minute rates were:
6 QSOs/minute 1 times.
5 QSOs/minute 28 times.
4 QSOs/minute 197 times.
3 QSOs/minute 456 times.
2 QSOs/minute 569 times.
1 QSOs/minute 420 times.
There were 2330 bandchanges and 1499 (38.8%) probable 2nd radio QSOs.
Number of letters in callsigns
Letters # worked
-----------------
3 3
4 1306
5 1513
6 1003
7 8
8 17
9 8
10 2
Multi-band QSOs
---------------
1 bands 1647
2 bands 490
3 bands 205
4 bands 107
5 bands 38
6 bands 0
------- S i n g l e B a n d Q S O s ------
Band 160 80 40 20 15 10
----------------------------------------------
QSOs 0 165 416 208 659 199
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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