CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB
Call: N1EU
Operator(s): N1EU
Station: N1EU
Class: SOAB(A) HP
QTH: Albany NY
Operating Time (hrs): 27
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160:
80: 24 10 21
40: 73 22 58
20: 301 32 115
15: 348 36 127
10: 1162 36 142
------------------------------
Total: 1908 136 463 Total Score = 3,314,267
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
I’m not much of a ssb contester and normally put in 10-20 hours to help the
club’s score. Three motivators pushed me a little more this year:
1. incredible 10M condx
2. desire to battle test my recently rebuilt 3-el SteppIR
(I refuse to battle for a ssb run frequency and listen to the cacophony - so
insisting on a clear passband means I’ll only run on 10M (where there's so
much spectrum) during a ssb contest. The SteppIR passed with flying colors.)
3. getting my hands on a new SDR and curious how we would play together in the
contest.
I ran PowerSDR with the Apache Labs ANAN-10 and it was interfaced to a Hercules
DJ console to provide a knob interface. To make a long story short, the radio
performed incredibly well and I have no doubt that DDC/DUC SDR rigs are going
to engulf the hf world. In short:
1. Receive audio quality is, by far, the best I’ve ever listened to
2. Filtering is amazing
3. Combination of onscreen GUI and knob console worked great
4. Panadapter to scan the band or see your neighbors during a run was
brilliant.
5. AGC action was excellent - could easily read weak signals under strong
signals. Nice to be able to set AGC threshold with onscreen indicator
superimposed on panadapter waveform.
6. Great ALC meter and S-meter action
The negatives I experienced were infrequent popping sounds in the receiver,
sluggish T/R turn-around when the subreceiver (dual watch) was on, and audio
latency. I didn’t fully understand the latency issue going into the contest
and want to apologize for the truncation of the audio on the end of EVERY xmsn
I made in the contest (duh). I didn't realize I couldn't simply release PTT
after I finished speaking - I needed to allow a fraction of a second for the tx
audio to complete. This is graphically illustrated on this sample recording of
one of my qso’s: http://n1eu.com/px2w.mp3 - wow, it’s both embarrassing
and mind boggling that I made more than a few contacts doing this. I only
received one comment about the problem during a 10M run by a friendly
Englishman and I didn’t realize the extent of it until listening to a
soundclip after the contest.
Because of the latency, it’s not possible to monitor your audio. So isolated
headphones are not a good choice. I ended up using Sennheiser HD580 with an
add-on boom microphone from modmic.com - I was very happy with this setup.
Although I LOVE N1MM software, I was plagued by delays. It seemed like every
few minutes when entering a contact, the computer would pause for up to 10
seconds while doing internal housekeeping on the spot database. I have a
rocket of a computer and am filtering my spots with a short timeout, so I hope
this presumably software issue gets resolved soon.
The only 160/80/40M antenna currently functional here is a low 40M dipole.
This also helped keep me less than truly serious in my efforts ;-)
Thanks for all the qso’s and again, apologies for the truncated audio.
73, Barry N1EU
rig: Apache Labs ANAN-10 SDR
amp: THP HL-50B, Acom 2000A
antennas: 3 element SteppIR @ 19m/60ft, 40M dipole @ 11m/35ft
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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