British Columbia QSO Party - 2019
Call: VE7FO
Operator(s): VA7GI VE7FO
Station: VE7FO
Class: Multi-OpCW HP
QTH: Vancouver
Operating Time (hrs): 17
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Dig Qs CW Mults Ph Mults Dig Mults
-----------------------------------------------------------
160: 2 0 0 3 0 0
80: 25 0 0 17 0 0
40: 29 0 0 25 0 0
20: 327 0 0 66 0 0
15: 15 0 0 13 0 0
10: 1 0 0 2 0 0
-----------------------------------------------------------
Total: 399 0 0 126 0 0 Total Score = 201,196
Club: Orca DX and Contest Club
Comments:
Well, that was "interesting"
As mentioned (too many times?) elsewhere, I'm in the process of converting my
Single Op LP station into a dual op QRO setup. It's taking forever as I'm very
slow. At the moment I do have 2 op positions (A and B) with K3s and amps
feeding a 4O3A 2x8 antenna switch plus QRO filters and triplexer feeding an old
TH3 tribander, a couple of dipoles for 40 & 80 and 30 ft inverted L for 160.
Still lots to do to improve antenna and grounding situation. Still, I can get
on the air with 2 ops. Well, that was before position B got piled high with
stuff I don't seem to have a place for. Even worse, I lost the hard drive at
the main op position a few days ago. Oh well, just take the computer from B and
connect it to all the now vacant wires at A, turn it on and I'll be in business.
Hah! Mouse won't work. That was an easy one. Just use the B mouse which has
already been paired with the B computer.
Next up was figuring out why the microham keyer I moved from B to A wouldn't
work properly. I finally remembered that the keyer settings go with the keyer
so I had to reconfigure it for pos'n A. Fortunately I have screen shots of all
the keyer configuration settings. OK, now I'll be in business. Oops, not so
fast - whenever I minimized the keyer icon it shut down the keyer, thereby
eliminating all the virtual serial ports. Cold boot took care of this once Win
7 downloads finished with me.
What's this about Win 7? Went to find out about this stuff on the net, hit the
wrong button and downloaded 18 MS patches. Once that was done I had no net
access from A. Turned out that I needed "supervisor" access to get
the net back. I HATE this supervisor BS. Trips me up every time.
There's more but it's too painful to remember.
So, finally get on the air. Hmm.... spots are sometimes there and sometimes
not. The master computer which serves up the spots keeps telling me that some
unknown computer is attempting to log on as B. I think I cancelled over a
thousand of these messages. I also found that I could CQ for an hour without
N1MM telling me that I've been spotted. Checked RBN and lots of spots for me.
Also would get a flood of spots into the bandmap which would then peter out
leaving the bandmap empty and then fill it up again (when it felt like it).
Didn't dare try to fix the network issues in case it died completely and decided
to live with it.
Did I ever think of abandoning the contest? Yup. Glad I didn't though.
It did result in questions as to whether or not I could get SSB and RTTY working
in time. We (VA7GI and I) concluded that more pain was not an acceptable option
and elected to stick to CW.
I thought conditions were pretty good considering the state of the sun. Band
noise was only around S2, Even on low bands, and lots of extremely faint
stations could be worked if one were patient. Quite a few Americans called and
virtually every one of them knew what we needed in the exchange, thanks to
Rebecca's efforts to promulgate the BCQP infO widely.
Activity level was enough to keep us interested and will certainly be back next
year (with a fully functional station). I'm pleased with our performance but
know we can do better.
Thank you Rebecca for all the work you do to make the BCQP a success. It's very
much appreciated. Thanks to all the ops for participating and making it fun for
everyone.
And CONGRATULATIONS TO VE7UF and VE7TI for their giant scores. They're both very
close to setting all time all QSO Party events records (other than NAQP), based
on a quick check of CQP and FQP results for a few previous years. WOW
73, Jim VE7FO
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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