CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW - 2020
Call: VE3UTT
Operator(s): VE3UTT
Station: VE3UTT
Class: SO(A)AB HP
QTH: FN04
Operating Time (hrs): <20
Remote Operation
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160:
80: 2 2 2
40: 293 28 88
20: 523 35 110
15: 462 26 89
10: 34 16 30
------------------------------
Total: 1314 107 319 Total Score = 1,460,328
Club: Carolina DX Association
Comments:
K3 / Optibeam / 80m "V"
I intended to work the contest from my station. We came up to Canada on
November 10th and spent the 14 days in quarantine. It gave me time to fix my
80m “V” and ready everything. However, on the 14th day my wife got a call
from her sister that she was needed in California, ASAP. We spent our
quarantine free day doing the business/official things that we needed to do
since we were last there in February and making plane reservations. Due to
current conditions there are no direct flights from YYZ to San Francisco and the
fares were $1200 CDN – crazy. So we drove back to the US where the direct
fare was $510 US.
Well the little time I had for the contest was now for remote operation with the
bulk of time preparing for my wife’s trip. I had very strange problems I
hadn’t experienced before in addition to the usual remote challenges. I would
type a call and randomly it would double a character. S&P is not a great
problem but running a definite cause for repeats. I was just going to do
S&P but every 2 or 3 minutes N1MM would lose the radio connection and had to
be reset making S&P a real chore. So I started to run whenever I could
which was not affected by the loss of comms with N1MM – so now the double
strike characters were a problem. Then there would be periods where I hit enter
to send a message or log a call and nothing would happen for from 5 to 30
seconds. Things were getting interesting! I replaced my new highly-rated
wireless keyboard with another highly-rated wireless keyboard – no real
difference. I was about to quit when I remembered that my newly built potent PC
had a PS2 connector. I shut everything down and plugged in my 20 year old HP
PS2 keyboard and voila no more double characters and no more lag entering
information. Also, the N1MM disconnects became almost non-existent. In case
you suspect the PC, it’s using the latest AMD high-end gaming board with the
580 chipset and a Ryzen 5-3600 processor with new matching fast memory and
high-end M.2 disk. The PC is fast! Additionally, I have tuned it and raised
the program priority for N1MM to and all unnecessary programs are closed. CPU
runs at 2-3% and memory slightly higher.
The takeaway is that gamers use wired keyboards for a reason. None of these
problems occur with my shack computer nor have I experienced them in weekly
CWT’s which I mostly do remote. Must be the emerging sunspots. Remote
operation makes things even more interesting.
I thought conditions were pretty good and was able to work WAZ in the 20 hours I
spent on between other chores. Hope all had fun.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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