ARRL Sweepstakes, SSB
Call: NK7U
Operator(s): NK7U, K7ZO
Station: NK7U
Class: Multi-Op
QTH: Oregon
Operating Time (hrs): 20
Summary:
Band QSOs
-------------------------------
160: 0
80: 101
40: 111
20: 305
15: 163
10: 959
-------------------------------
Total: 1639 x 80 = 262,240
Club: Snake River Contest Club
Comments:
Joe/NK7U and I decided to have some fun and run a multi-op for phone
sweepstakes from his QTH in Oregon, in celebration of his moving back to Baker
City from California where he lived the last three years. His station is really
built for M/S DX contests with many high antennas and stacks thereof. For SS we
ended up using a single low antenna out of his rotating two stacks. For example
a 10M antenna at about 25' was usually 2-3 S units better than its upper pair
at 55'. We did have a problem with the lower 40M beam so we had to use the
upper one at 180' that probably cost us something.
Didn't quite make it a maximum effort as I had to drive 2 hours back to Boise
and I didn't want to get home at 11PM needing to get up for work the next
morning. Operated about 20 hours and so could easily have added 150-200 more
QSO's to the log, pushing our score up to the 290,000 range or so.
Our rates on Sunday, though certainly lower than Saturday, were remarkably
steady. See the rate sheet below, but we had consecutive hours of 69, 78, 58,
75, 78, 77, 78, and Sunday.
Looking at a few posts it is interesting to see how different this contest is
run as you travel east to west across the country. On the east coast and upper
mid-west 40 and 80 are the main bands. In the south it is more of a 20M
contest. And, as you get out our way 10M is the band. We were on 10M about the
whole day on Sunday except for a short trip to 15M. (Where s3-s4 power line
noise made things really tough and probably cost us 30-40Q's on Saturday while
we were there.) The reasons for the 10M focus for the west are probably two
fold. Being farther west, when 10M is open, it is open for longer since we have
more daylight on Saturday than the east coast gang. Also, the population
density is much lower out here meaning the low bands won't snag as many QSO's
close in as they do in the east. And trying to capture the 100W and a dipole
gang in coast to coast QSO's is really tough. This is why SS in low sunspot
years is much tougher on the west coast than on the east.
For being a Multi we started sweating the sweep. Coming into Sunday morning we
still needed QC/PQ and the infamous YT. Joe found a VE2 and worked him and then
of course we worked another 3 or 4 in the next hour. That left VT. Joe also
found the really ugly VY1VY pileup on 21200 and got through fairly quickly.
This was in the 1800Z hour on Sunday so it took us about 15 hours of operating
to get the sweep.
We used WriteLog as we have been for the last couple of years at NK7U because
of its great networking support and other cool features. However, we really got
finger tied with the way it handles serial numbers across multiple PC's. (Like
many multi-ops we ran two hardware interlocked stations that kept us from
transmitting at the same time.) The problem we ran into is that WL would "lock"
a serial number when one PC would start entering QSO data. So if the S&P
station would pre-fill the data entry line with the call, check, etc. it would
lock in the serial number from the run station. This caused confusion to the
run station who started wondering what happened to the next serial number, etc.
We learned to just not type anything in on the S&P station until you were
actually in the QSO process. If anyone has any thoughts or observations on this
please let me know. I know it is hard problem to solve but it seems like we are
not quite there yet.
Scott/K7ZO
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
--
FAQ on WWW: http://www.contesting.com/FAQ/3830
Submissions: 3830@contesting.com
Administrative requests: 3830-REQUEST@contesting.com
Problems: owner-3830@contesting.com
|