CQWW WPX Contest, CW - 2020
Call: NW6P
Operator(s): N6GD W9KKN NW6P
Station: NW6P
Class: M/S HP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs):
Remote Operation
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 0
80: 35
40: 747
20: 1019
15: 128
10: 0
------------
Total: 1929 Prefixes = 735 Total Score = 3,060,540
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
First of all, sorry it took me so long to post this, I ended the contest
exhausted and fell into a super busy week. But I'm back!
As always, thanks to Tom/NW6P for letting us use the station!
So I've been operating Tom's station for a while now as a single op, in person,
and over time I've been gradually expanding the ability to operate the station
remotely. Tom has always wanted to do more multi-ops, so given the quarantine,
it was time to improve that capability. I spent a bunch of time working out what
it would take to do a virtual multi-op at NW6P, applying lessons learned from
the N6RO team along with several others. I also had the chance to try a few new
things, like network QoS.
About a month ago, I set out to make a few improvements to the station, and
while I didn't finish everything I wanted to finish
(primarily due to supplies just not arriving in time), we were in a position to
do a M/S. I sent out a message to a few people I thought might be willing to
join us for such an event and had a few offers, but in the end, our team was
myself, Greg/N6GD, and Tom/NW6P.
Let's start with what went well:
- We were able to welcome Greg/N6GD to the team of NW6P operators virtually.
- N6GD's first experience with RRC boxes was generally good. Once we get a few
bugs ironed out, remote operation should be an effective way to share access to
contest stations!
- We kept a Zoom room going for the duration of the contest, as well as a Slack
channel, and text messaging--The Zoom connection was quite useful for
maintaining a sense of team connection during the contest.
- Friday evening, the bands seemed like they were in pretty good shape to start
with.
- Saturday afternoon on 20m was a blast. Run rates hit over 140 QSOs/hr!
- The QoS worked perfectly. Nothing that Tom was doing in the house, nor the VNC
sessions were able to interfere with our audio streams Almost no extra clicks or
pops at all.
- We managed to get NW6P on the air for part of it!
But, this first experiment wasn't without problems:
- We had initially tried the DXLog.net logger. While I've been trying to make
this logger my default, I had some real trouble getting it to stay responsive
over a TCP link. It seemed to want to hold the "TU" CW message hostage
until the network had acknowledged the log entry -- which in some cases was a
full 1-2 seconds -- this really slowed our Friday evening rate down. Earlier
experiments with this software in CWTs did not have this issue, so I'll have to
figure out what's going on with that. Eventually it got so bad that mid contest,
I moved to N1MM. Luckily, I was able to make this switch very quickly because I
was ready for it.
- N6GD's windows VM had some problem with SmartSDR CAT that required him to
repair the installation of his VSP drivers every time he rebooted windows
(though it took us a while to figure out what was going on)
- Flex SmartLink sporadically lost the registration for the radio, or the radio
believed it didn't have internet connectivity (this is a really weird one --
still investigating)
- In total, we lost close to 4.5 operating hours from the above issues, one of
which was super important Friday night.
- N6GD's RRC box had repetitive, severe noise for about 8 seconds out of each
and every minute; when running Greg eventually learned to transmit during those
noise periods, he still had to ask for a fair amount of retransmissions (NR?).
- Amplifier monitoring software crashed on Sunday. Greg didn't realize that
meant the amplifier was down as well, so he operated for about two hours with 20
Watts instead of 1.5 kW. He managed to keep up a slow run of EU stations
nonetheless. We can only imagine what the run would have been like with full
power!
How were the conditions? Hit and miss. Saturday morning was awful. Almost
non-existent EU on 20m, even going into the early afternoon, a lot of nothing.
As for the result? Amusingly enough, I had predicted a score of about 3 million
at the beginning of May -- and that's exactly what happened.
Anyway, hopefully some of the stuff that I wanted to get done before the contest
will slowly happen over the next few weeks as the parts arrive. We're going to
add a bunch of capability to this station in the near future.
Thanks for the Q's everyone! See you in the next contest!
-- Bill/W9KKN along with Tom/NW6P and Greg/N6GD
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
______________________________________________
3830 mailing list
3830@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/3830
|