ARRL RTTY Roundup
Call: W6YX
Operator(s): K6ENT, N6DE
Station: W6YX
Class: M/S LP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band QSOs Points
-----------------------
80: 33 33
40: 96 96
20: 176 176
15: 243 243 <---Multipliers --->
10: 280 280 W-VE DX Total
--------------------------------------------------------
Total: 828 828 57 51 108 = 89,424
Club:
Comments:
Equipment:
CQ Station - Yaesu FT1000MP, Hal DXP38 and MMTTY
S&P Station - Yaesu FT1000MP MkV, MMTTY
Networked Writelog v10.29E
Assortment of monoband/triband yagis
Kent K6ENT and I felt more prepared for this contest
than any other RTTY contest we've ever entered.
Improvements over last year include dual receive
on the run station, RTTY actually working on the S&P
station, MMTTY plug-in for Writelog, rig control on the
S&P station, analysis of last year's log to develop a
band plan, an additional 20m antenna which improved our
stateside signal, strategy to best utilize our 6 band
changes per hour, and our increased familiarity of
RTTY contesting.
With all this, I felt we could win the M/S LP category
this year. But it simply did not happen for us! We
finished with 101 QSOs less than last year. We were
down on every band except 10m. I felt that band
conditions were good, there were plenty of stations
in the contest, and we were on the right bands
most of the time. The problem this year is that
our CQs were just not effective, for whatever reason.
We share AA5AU's comments about unanswered
CQs. We tried everything: go high in the band, go low
in the band, go right in the middle, switch bands, see if
there is QRM around us, beam in different directions, etc.
We seemed to either lose our CQ frequency or just
could not get callers to respond. This led to us doing
more S&P than we wanted. It was quite perplexing.
The only explanation I have is that the karma was
just not with us this year!
It also did not help that we suffered a computer crash
on Saturday afternoon. It ended up taking 30 minutes
to resolve. You simply cannot have 18 and 19 QSO hours
in this contest and expect to win.
We also observed that stations were moving around
A LOT. Few people parked on a frequency and stayed
there. Often, stations that we put in our S&P band map
were not there 15-30 minutes later!
Anyway, we still had a lot of fun! We had 51 DX mults,
which I felt was great from CA running low power.
Highlights include CN8LI answering our CQ, and
being heard by JY9NX and EM1HO.
Given we were running low power and in California,
one shocking statistic is that EU accounted for
9.3% of our QSOs; JA only 4.2%. In a few years,
those of us on the west coast will just be listening
to the east coast run EU while we continue to reminisce
as we are now about when there used to be great
JA activity in contests.
Running the Hal DXP38 and MMTTY in a dual-receive
configuration on the CQ station was the ultimate setup!
It made a tremendous difference. We felt like we could
decode ANYONE! Whenever I called CQ, I recall
only one station (which was barely moving the S meter)
that I could not print. We used the DXP38 as our
main workhorse, and MMTTY in profile P1, P2, or P4.
Either decoder could be better at any time.
Changing an MMTTY profile on-the-fly was
valuable. We also loved the MMTTY tuning display.
This allowed us to tune stations in faster than
we ever have previously.
I agree with GU0SUP on his observation about some
strong stations having trouble printing. I could understand
if the problem was 3 or more stations calling at
the same time, making it difficult to decode something
out of it. That happened to us a few times. But the
problem could also be that the decoder used had
trouble with fluttery signals. I remember having
problems with this in the past. Also, not being active
constantly on RTTY, I used to have trouble
using the RIT to tune in stations. Our cure for these
issues was to use dual-receive, take advantage
of MMTTY's tuning indicator and decoding profiles,
and configure our DXP38 with a 6dB or 12dB gain setting.
We did not use the AFC or NET features on MMTTY.
Congrats to the AA4NC team (and anyone else who
kicked our butts in the M/S LP category).
Thanks to the following people:
-AA5AU and K9JY for their great web pages on
Writelog and RTTY.
-KC6SXC for making it very easy to connect machines
to the shack network.
-K6EP for his tips on MMTTY.
73...
-Dean - N6DE
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