Michigan QSO Party
Call: KT8K
Operator(s): KT8K
Station: KT8K
Class: Single Op QRP
QTH: EN82ch SE Michigan
Operating Time (hrs): 11:52
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs
--------------------
80: 46 38
40: 114 98
20: 13 1
15: 0 0
10: 0 0
--------------------
Total: 173 137 CW Mults = 69 Ph Mults = 61 Total Score = 63,830
Club: Mad River Radio Club
Comments:
Another great Michigan QSO Party! A BIG thanks to the organizers as well as
everyone else involved, and special thanks to all who listened hard (sometimes)
to pull my peanut whistle signal out of the noise. 20 meters wasn't very good
to me - when I checked there was rarely more than a single station there on SSB
or CW. I heard someone saying they made some Q's on 15m but I never found
anyone to work there, so I didn't spend much time there. 40 and 80m were the
money bands for me, as usual.
I planned to make a full-on effort, with the added intent to note and follow
the pre-announced rovers as I've seen others do in the past, but I never heard
half of them and managed mulitiple contacts with only three. That strategy was
still a good thing since I probably got additional multipliers out of it. I
expected more, but the conditions just didn't seem to support it. Thanks to
the rovers, though. They put real effort, time, and money into what they do,
and watching out for and trying to find them makes it more fun.
This year marked a change of strategy I don't know if I want to share (but it's
pretty obvious anyway). In past years I always spent more time on CW, lured by
the "2 points per QSO" (combined with the challenge of operating QRP
and the relative advantage of CW in signal-to-noise ratio). This time, quite
early in the contest, I decided multipliers were a better thing to chase since
(though I didn't do any exhaustive what-if math modeling) it seemed like a more
equal number of Q's and mults would produce a better score. That meant spending
a lot more time on SSB, but fortunately conditions were good enough that I was
almost always heard by those I called. As a result, this is a personal best
performance in score and multipliers but not QSO's, and the raw score is almost
18% higher with 14 less Q's than my previous best. (I'm gonna start modeling
these contest scoring rules mathematically, like I should have done when I
started "contesting" back in 2003 or so.)
This is my FAVORITE contest for running, which I almost never get to do as a
died-in-the-wool QRP op. I had 7(!) runs of >10 Q's (and several with 9 Q's
- too few for N1MM+ to recognize them) - a personal best. Best hour was 52
(another "best") and fastest run was 29 Q's (1712-1729Z) at ... 101.9
Q's/hour! I am totally Stoked! I made 42.6% of my Q's by running. In most
contests I waste a cumulative half hour or more in attempted runs that get me
zero, zip, nada.
In the last third of the party a lot of ops were slowing down, way down, and I
had to skip over some because I just couldn't wait for minutes while they
fumbled with their computers or compared notes with their buddies. I thought a
few were falling asleep between Q's (can't say I haven't done this at some point
in the past, tho). I was also slowed down by ops who wouldn't give their call
sign until they'd worked out the current pile up - nothing like waiting for
several minutes only to find out the station you're waiting for is a dupe!
This contest is a little like ARRL Field Day, I also noticed - a lot of ops are
clearly not experienced contesters. Still, the more the merrier!
No new equipment or antennas here, unfortunately, but what I've got is doing
well for this small city lot. I had a great time overall, though it took a lot
of caffeine and determination. Thanks again to everyone for all the fun!
72(73) to all de kt8k - Tim
Equipment
- Tentec Orion dialed down to 5 Watts, using the diversity mode receive to
always keep one antenna in each ear - that way I can switch transmit quickly to
the best one for that QSO.
- N1MM+ software* and my old MFJ Grandmaster keyer with early 1980's Bencher
paddle do the CW, and a WGA TR-2000 headset handles the mic function.
Antennas
- 20/40/80m triple parallel dipole in a 'W' configuration hanging from trees,
feed point at about 45 feet.
- 10/15/20 trap dipole suspended vertically, center about 50 feet up in the
trees
- 500 foot not-very-horizontal loop (the South side of it is up 60 feet or so,
but the North side of the loop is at about 15 feet, and the wire zigs and zags
wildly. The loop is shaped like a circle with one side poked in about 30% of
its diameter.)
- K9AY loop didn't help noticeably on 80 so it didn't get used much at all
* I haven't always used N1MM for the MiQP, but I'm using the new N1MM+ now, and
this time had all-too-frequent issues.
(1) A design issue: I often hit the escape key to stop sending a canned CW
message, but if I miss and hit the grave accent ''' key next to the esc key,
the rig jumps into split mode (GRRRrrrr) and I suddently find myself
transmitting on my B VFO which may be on another band. This happened a number
of times when I was running, leaving another station waiting for me to push
buttons and fuss with the rig before I could answer them. I was fast, though,
so that may have only cost me one QSO.
(2) Dupe system confusion: I realize QSO parties aren't as big a deal as the
big contests, but the "Dupe" indications were often wrong, and I
accidentally called (and sometimes worked) several people twice as a result.
The color coding N1MM has used on the band map, which has been extremely useful
in other contests, was totally screwy this time, showing stations as worked when
they weren't, or as desirable multipliers when they weren't, or as not-worked
when they were. I hope the programmers work on that (maybe I'll drop them a
line ...). I have long preferred N1MM over the other logging programs, and I
don't think that's going to change, but the program kind of let me down this
time.
(3) N1MM+ was also confused by /M versus /county suffixes, or I was confused
about how it would handle them, but I wrote that off to it being a QSO party
and difficult for the N1MM programmers to cope with. Best rx to all -- Tim
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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