ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: 6Y2T
Operator(s): VE3DZ
Station: 6Y5WJ
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: St.Elizabeth
Operating Time (hrs): 43
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 361 52
80: 736 59
40: 1112 60
20: 1607 61
15: 1416 60
10: 202 41
-------------------
Total: 5434 333 Total Score = 6,426,568
Club: Contest Club Ontario
Comments:
K3 + MLA2500B (800 watts)
TS590 + ACOM1000 (600 watts)
10/15/20 m - 2 el. Quad at 30', Spiderbeam at 30'.
40 m: 2 phased verticals, Inv. Vee
80 m: Inv. Vee
160 m: Inv. L
2 Beverages 520' each towards EU and JA.
First of all, big Thank You to Josh 6Y5WJ and his wife Jenny for their great
hospitality.
I returned to Jamaica for the ARRL DX after a year of absence. My 5th ARRL CW
from 6Y2T. I was pleasantly surprised to see that another antenna was added
�" a Spiderbeam at 30' pole to be used for the 2nd radio and another 40 m
vertical was phased with existing one to make it directional towards North.
I had a lot of time at home to prepare, but procrastination took over and I
ended up packing things on the very last day. As a result, out of 2 USB
interfaces that I brought, one was defective (I confused it with the same
looking working unit) and another one appeared to be outdated and didn't want
to work with the existing computer under Windows 8. :-(
I could really facing the possibility of doing the whole contest the “P40W
style” using just the paddle.
Anyway, as usual, Josh's “magical top drawer” came to rescue, and few much
needed transistors and resistors were found inside along with the few prolific
USB-to-serial port adapters. We even made one trip to the local computer store
to buy spare unit. After almost two days of “dancing with tambourine around
the fire” everything was up and running and I was a happy boy on Friday
morning.
All these days I was also trying to check propagation on 10 meters and the band
appeared to be dead empty all the time including Friday afternoon. I was reading
reports from Nate N4YDU who was down there in TI5 land saying that he had few
openings to Mid-West and West Coast on Thursday and I knew I could be in
trouble.
Even 15 m didn't sound very promising at first.
Anyway, I started the contest pretty well on 20 with the usual rate of 3-4 Q's
a minute and then, probably after 10 or 15 minutes the CW interface started to
act sending crappy CW, first just at times, but later �" always.
Perfect timing! (I don't like N1MM+ Logger for that!)
I had to forget about SO2R and started to send using paddle. Another couple of
hours went by with me sending exchange by hand and trying to do troubleshooting
“on the fly” at the same time. Finally by 0300 Z I after playing with
different adapters I found one that would work perfectly on CW, but at a cost
of losing CAT control. Nothing would really work for CAT �" the radio
control would just get frozen after few few minutes giving me the run-time
error. All in all, I decided to forget about it and had to enter the frequency
on the 2nd radio manually. Oh well, no big deal �" it's a “CQ”
Contest anyway. I managed my goal of having more than 1,000 QSO's in the LOG by
0500 UTC though I have not really started using SO2R up until 0400 Z. After that
everything worked smoothly, and conditions on low bands seemed to be fair, just
heavy static crashes on 80 and 160.
Saturday morning brought the usual challenge of getting attraction of the U.S.
Stations on 20 meters who were all into high rate working Europeans... Using
relatively low power (600 watts on 20) wasn't helping either. 15 opened rather
late, but then it was pretty good later in the day helping to produce some
decent rates. All the time I was checking 10 meters trying to catch short
sporadic openings, but only managed 38 contacts with 12 states on the first
day. Sometimes it looked you were working through meteor scatters �" you
hear a station for s few seconds pretty loud and then it just disappears. K3LR
tried to work me a couple of times with no luck.
The conditions were even better on Saturday night with 80 and 160 sounding
quieter. But fatigue finally took over and I decided to take few short naps in
order to be in shape for the Sunday high bands run. I don't know how and why,
but I ended up with 5 hours of down time, which definitely did cost me few
extra hundred QSO's...
On Sunday I just parked the second radio on 28017 hoping for better luck with
10 meters. I was CQ'ing there for few long hours with full understanding that
I'm losing rate because of that, but was rewarded with total of 202 QSO's and
41 multipliers which I believe exceeds even the 10 m score of ZF1A... Some
contacts were a real miracle with the stations being audible just for a few
seconds. I knew it would be impossible even to hope for a win without 10m, but
at least I tried.
Besides terrible 10 m conditions, the most disappointing thing was so-called
“packet pile-ups”. You would know even without checking that you were
spotted with busted call when all of a sudden few stations at a time start to
call you and all of them are dupes... I don't know what drives those people who
are in rush to spot you with a BS call, but I honestly can't understand why
people just point, click and work without applying even a bit of thinking... BY
in morning on 15 meters in the midst of sunspot minimum? Or on 40 m when it's a
middle of the day in China?
Seriously?
Those “smart spots” added few hundred dupes to my scores and wasted at
least 2 hours of my operating time...
Anyway,
Congrats to N4YDU at TI5W and W2SC at 8P5A on their nice scores! Especially I'm
glad for Nate who I knew was investing a lot into this trip.
Thanks to all for the QSO good luck in the Phone part.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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