7th Call Area QSO Party
Call: W9KKN
Operator(s): W9KKN
Station: NW6P
Class: SO(A)SSB HP
QTH: Cupertino, CA
Operating Time (hrs): 18
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Dig Qs
----------------------------
160:
80: 56
40: 186
20: 166
15:
10:
6:
2:
----------------------------
Total: 0 408 0 Mults = 113 Total Score = 92,208
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
As always, special thanks to Tom (NW6P) for graciously hosting me at his station
-- especially this time, because he's currently remodeling the room and this
contest ended up delaying the removal of the furniture that the gear sits on.
Also, kudos to Rafael (KG6DQL) for helping replace the high/low voltage switch
in Tom's Alpha 87A a few weeks ago, after I had determined that it had failed
and was stuck on "low", leading it to run at half-power. The amplifier
and station are playing well again! Even the QRM in the neighborhood seemed to
be more under control than normal for the contest.
I'm not sure what possessed me to go for an 18-hour contest, but knowing a few
people who were doing county expeditions (W6IA/W7EEE) and of course, the N7N
expedition team helped to motivate. If they were going to go through all of that
trouble, the very least I could do was work them. One of these days I'll have to
expand into 7QP expeditions, but for now, CQP and Field Day with WVARA keep me
pretty busy.
I looked through the previous results and decided that I might be able to target
the Non-7 SOSSB HP Assisted category, even though it is not eligible for a
plaque, I'm hoping for a good result.
A geomagnetic storm hit just as the contest was ramping up and took a noticeable
toll on the bands -- but it looked like possible Es activity was present on 10m,
and 15m was open for a bit, but not many participants gave it a chance.
I didn't focus only on 7QP, but also Indiana and New England QSO Parties.
If you intend on working all three of these contests in N1MM+, you'll use the
IN7QPNE contest which allows all of the exchanges of the various QSO parties.
The contest sponsors tell you to upload the same log to each contest robot and
let their log checking sort it out. Unfortunately, this means that you'll have a
little trouble submitting your scores to 3830 because I can't find an easy way
in N1MM to display the individual contest results. This same issue also seemed
to be causing problems for the live score reporting sites. I was able to write a
little code to split the contest into a few ADIFs which I was then able to
re-import and re-score, but I'm hoping that others found a better way.
General commentary:
In a state/regional QSO party, if you're in the state or region, please run. I
thought this would be a mostly a search and pounce effort for me out of
state/region, but I very quickly exhausted the supply of stations to work and
end up CQing myself. Running led to my other problem which was having a bunch of
stations calling me that I couldn't work in the contest. I tried to make it
clear in my CQ message recording, but alas there were a few that kept calling.
I went between nicely explaining to them "sorry, we can't work" to
logging the zero-point contacts quickly to get onto the next QSO. I also wish
the "are you sure you want to log this contact with an invalid
exchange?" dialog box was implemented in a slightly different way because
it slowed me down.
73 & Thanks for the Q's everyone!
-- Bill/W9KKN
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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