ARRL DX Contest, SSB
Call: N4TZ/9
Operator(s): N4TZ
Station: N4TZ/9
Class: SOAB LP
QTH: IN
Operating Time (hrs): 25
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 27 23
80: 87 50
40: 137 57
20: 219 81
15: 229 81
10: 210 68
-------------------
Total: 909 360 Total Score = 981,720
Club: Society of Midwest Contesters
Comments:
Had a bunch of problems going in. Glad I wasn't planning
on an all-out effort this weekend. It seems the bands
were in much better shape than the ARRL CW contest two
weeks ago. 160 was much quieter here and apparently in
Europe as well, as I had more success on SSB than CW there.
Before week before the contest I decided to update my
TR4W version, only to find that the newer versions,
including the one released the day of the contest,
no longer support the traditional TR way of entering
the split transmit frequency (just enter - which brings
up a transmit frequency window). Back to a my much
older version of TR4W which still supports the TR
standard. Good thing, because a lot of my 40m QSOs
and a few of the 75m ones were split.
The morning of the contest I connected my 160m antenna
at the base of the tower, replacing my temporary 17m
antenna. Went into the shack and found that I had
horrible noise on my transmitted signal (loud hash/
buzzing/rf feedback) on 160 and to a lesser extent
on 80 and 40. The last thing I had done in the shack
was to reinstall my Winkeyer which had been out on
load for a few months. TR4W does a fine job keying the
TX with the PTT command in SSB, but it doesn't work on
CW so there is a menu change when changing modes.
Not so good with the Russian mixed mode contest on
the horizon. So, I use the Winkeyer's PTT outputs
to key the tx on SSB and the Winkeyer's Keyer outputs
on CW, bypassing the DXDoubler. Since that was the
last thing I changed in the shack, I started my
trouble shooting there. Eventually, Friday afternoon
I ripped out the Winkeyer and went to the TR4W PTT
on command. That seemed to fix 10-80 but still had
the problem on 160.
I put a dummy load right on the rig output and the
problem went away. Moving the dummy load to the
output of the SWR bridge (after the monitor scope)
showed the problem was still there. This happened
on both radios....
If I used the Orion's internal voice memories for my
callsigna and report, there was no problem on 160
with my signal, but there was no way to interact
with the world if there was any problem. Experience
with 160 told me that was not likely. And I was
right.
I spent about 25 hours total at the rigs, taking off
Sunday morning for church, Sunday afternoon for
driving my wife to visit a nursing home, getting
5 hours sleep each night, and every so often trying
another idea to fix things. Saturday night I
spent a while at EU sunrise with my Heil headset
plugged directly into one of the Orions and had
some success on 160 with a clean signal. Of course,
no SO2R that way. However, it seemed to confirm
that the cabling must be part of the problem.
Monday, I had it narrowed down. Still not sure why
I never had the problems before, but after removing
many redundant cables and dressing the remaining cables,
I still had the problem on 160, even with 1 watt output.
My 160m antennas are 400 feet from the rigs, so it's
hard to see where the problem is. But, when I took
the cable running into the microphone input and
made 12 passes through a 2.4" 31-mix ferrite core
I now have no problems on SSB on 160.
JH4UYB has such a big signal on 75 with his 100 watts.
2016 ARRL-DX-SSB N4TZ
Continent List
160 80 40 20 15 10 ALL
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
USA calls = 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Canada calls = 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
NA calls = 12 17 22 33 37 35 156
SA calls = 4 6 9 29 28 58 134
Euro calls = 11 60 93 147 134 102 547
African calls = 0 1 2 4 5 9 21
Asian calls = 0 0 4 2 1 0 7
Japan calls = 0 2 5 1 19 0 27
Ocean calls = 0 2 3 3 5 8 21
Total calls = 27 88 138 219 229 212 913
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