ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: WC1M
Operator(s): WC1M
Station: WC1M
Class: SO Unlimited HP
QTH: NH
Operating Time (hrs): 26.5
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 60 44
80: 231 64
40: 622 89
20: 605 102
15: 520 104
10: 520 93
-------------------
Total: 2558 496 Total Score = 3,803,328
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
Only a partial effort this year, and for a change I went SOAB Unlimited. More
on that further below for those who are interested.
All in all, the conditions were very good most of the time. The low bands were
excellent the first night. Had good rate on 80 and didn’t need the beverage
most of the time. 160 was about as good as it gets here. I was able to work
every European I heard, often on the first call. Got a 100+ rate running 160,
which I almost never do with my puny 160/80 trapped inverted vee at 90-feet. I
thought my 44 mults on 160 were the best I’d ever done, but looking back
through the years it turns out it’s about average. My best was 54 in 2009,
and that was SOAB. Guess Skimmer and the cluster didn’t help all that much
after all, at least on 160. The low bands were noisier the second night so it
was much slower going.
20 and 15 opened when expected, and the rates were very high. It’s nice to be
the DX everyone is chasing! But the downside for me is that I can’t do much on
the second radio when the rate is over 175/hr or so, and the rate stayed that
high for long periods. I couldn’t get even a few seconds to listen to the
spots I was grabbing. And usually when a new pileup started it was so big and
so badly behaved (people calling and calling but not listening) that the rate
would suffer. Once things thinned out, though, 200+/hr was possible.
With the low flux, 10 opened late on Saturday morning. Usually it’s open by
1300z here, and sometimes much earlier. I was able to work spots by about
1400z, but couldn’t run until almost 1500z. That’s pretty late. The rate
was well over 100/hr, but it wasn’t spectacular �" nowhere near 200/hr.
10 was much better on the second day. It opened at about 1300z and was really
rocking. Rates remained good throughout the second day, but the bands were
noticeably noisier, especially 40 towards the end of the contest.
Things That Didn’t Go As Planned
I had intended to do a full effort, but various technical problems, plus
unexpected fatigue, plus wanting to attend my son’s championship basketball
game Sunday afternoon quickly put an end to that idea. And once a full effort
passed out of the realm of possibility, it got very easy to walk away from the
radio for some food, a nap or a nice long break to get the noise out of my
head. But still, half a contest is better than none!
Some things I learned (or re-learned) this year:
1. Don’t allow your decades-old well pump motor-start capacitor to fail a
few
hours before the contest begins.
2. Check station operation before the contests begins!
3. Don’t expect SOAB SO2R Unlimited/Assisted to be easy when you have
virtually no experience operating that way.
4. Don’t let spots suck you into DXing (but it’s so much fun with high
power…)
5. Keep running.
6. Research the best cluster to use and learn how to filter spots.
7. Define CW sub bands in Writelog before the contest starts so you don’t
get
SSB spots.
8. Pull crank-up tower coax out of the deep frozen snow before the contest.
9. Don’t install optional upgrade boards in your radio on Sunday morning!
#1 caught me by surprise at 1:00 PM on Friday. Spent the entire afternoon and
part of the early evening troubleshooting and repairing the well system. This
was a high-stress job because it really sucks when you have no water,
especially in the dead of winter when the well is buried under several feet of
frozen ground and another several feet of snow. Long story short, it was only
the motor-start capacitor, not the pump itself, and I was able to get the part
before the plumbing supply store closed. But the crisis caused me to miss the
first half hour of the contest and to be stressed and ill-prepared when I sat
down. When I first started serious contesting, I would spend every spare moment
during the week before the contest getting the station and myself ready. Then I
got lazy. And it seems like every contest something comes up at the last minute
that prevents getting off to a strong start.
The rest of the items on this list were dumb mistakes, really dumb.
Back when WRTC2018 announced the first version of the rules, which equalized
SOAB and Assisted, I decided to go Unlimited in ARRL DX and spent some time
setting up and testing CW Skimmer and packet at my station. Soon thereafter,
WRTC2018 changed the rules to differentiate the two categories. But after doing
all the work to set it up, I decided to stay the course. After all, some HOF
operators in W1 have gone assisted recently, which has lessened the shame
factor. Besides, both of my amps are autotune, which I thought might provide a
little edge.
Unfortunately, setting up Skimmer and packet a couple of months before the
contest doesn’t necessarily translate into plug-and-play on the day of the
contest. I forgot several things I had done to get it working and had to
troubleshoot the system all over again. I didn’t remember which cluster to
use for spots and fumbled around getting Skimmer to talk to my computer before
I realized DHCP had changed the IP address since the time I did the original
setup. And when I got into actual battle conditions, I realized that grabbing
packet spots to the second radio with Writelog is awkward and error-prone. If I
wasn’t careful, the spot would go to the run radio. And it seems that ALT-F4
doesn’t return to the run frequency, so every time I found a new run
frequency I had to store it in one of Writelog’s memories so I could quickly
return from working a spot.
This, plus the massive pileups, plus my SO2R skills having deteriorated due to
lack of 40+ hour efforts over the past couple of years made it hard to do
anything on the second radio. It takes practice to get good at SO2R
Assisted/Unlimited, and I foolishly assumed that I could sit down and run at
high rate while and shoot fish in a barrel. Not!
Another error was forgetting to pull my crannkup tower’s coax out from under
several feet of frozen snow before the contest. In fact, I entirely forgot to
raise the tower. The 72-foot crankup sports a 4-el 20m monobander that I use
for S&P on the second radio, quick direction changes, “stacked” with
antennas pointing in other directions, etc. It gets the most use later in the
contest when I’m trolling for mults. By the time I realized I didn’t have
the antenna available, it was getting dark on Saturday evening. So after the
big runs on Sunday morning I took a 45-minute break to put on snow pants and
boots, strap on snowshoes, make my way down a very steep hill to the tower,
yank the coax out from under the snow, and trudge back up the hill. Obviously,
I wouldn’t have wasted that time had I not already been out of the running
for top ten.
Finally, my wife brought the mail in on Saturday afternoon and I noticed that
it included a package from Elecraft containing three new KSYN3A boards for my
K3s. Having lost a ton of time already, I decided to get up early on Sunday to
install two of the boards in my run radio so I could test out the improvements.
That went smoothly, but the radio wouldn’t tune. Cycling power restored normal
operation, but when I changed bands the no-tune problem returned and I had to
cycle power several times to fix the radio. And sometimes after a power cycle
the radio wouldn’t receive any signals at all. Yikes! Luckily, I was able to
swap in another board that didn’t have these problems (though it did report
internal communication errors), and continue operating the contest.
Fortunately, the problem wasn’t bad hardware. It a firmware bug that Elecraft
quickly fixed after the contest. The entire exercise of installing the boards,
dealing with the problems and swapping boards probably cost at least two more
hours of operating time. Again, I was already behind the eight ball
standings-wise, so it didn’t really matter.
Only one antenna wasn’t 100%: my 15m monobander on a 48’ AB-577 that I use
for S&P, quick directions changes, multi-direction with other antennas,
etc. A large branch on a nearby tree has grown to the point that the antenna
can only be rotated from 300 degrees to 90 degrees. Still pretty useful in that
range because I have a C3E pointing South.
Despite failing to “walk the Beverage” since CQ WW CW (it would require
snowshoes now), the antenna seems to be working fine. Didn’t need it much the
first night because the bands were so quiet, but it was helpful at times the
second night.
I did manage to do a couple of things right for this contest: Last Fall I fixed
my 40m 4-square (used for Diversity reception). A couple of weeks ago I saw that
my middle TIC ring wouldn’t move when the temperature dropped into the teens
and did several things to make sure that wouldn’t happen during the contest:
I waited until temperature went above 20F, which allowed the middle TIC ring to
move, then used software to cycle all three TIC rings 360-degrees every fifteen
minutes during the two weeks before the contest. Despite temperatures from the
single digits to about 12F below zero, the cycling kept the rotors from
freezing and I had no problems with them during the contest.
Hoping to get back to full-effort contesting this year. Didn’t get off to a
good start, but there’s always the next one!
73, Dick WC1M
Antennas:
160M - trapped vee @90'
80M - delta loop @75, trapped vee @90'
40M - Cal-Av 2D-40A @110', 4-square
20M - 4/4/4 SteppIRs @96'/64'/34' on TICs, C3E @50', 4-el @72'
15M - 4/4/4 SteppIRs @96'/64'/34' on TICs, C3E @50', 5-el @50'
10M - 4/4/4 SteppIRs @96'/64'/34' on TICs, C3E @50'. 6-el @115'
Tower#1: Force 12 EF-610, Cal-AV 2D-40A, 4-el SteppIRs, 160/80 trapped vee
770-MDP: Force-12 EF-420
AB-577 #1: Force-12 EF-515
AB-577 #2: Force-12 C3E
Delta loop hung from a tree
dual 580' beverage aimed 20/220 degrees (not working?)
Equipment:
Elecraft K3 + Alpha 87A, Elecraft K3 + LP-PAN + Acom 2000A, Writelog,
LP-BRIDGE, PowerSDR-IF, YCCC SO2R Box, homebrew Windows antenna
switching/tuning software ("AntennaMaster"), iPad running TwoMon USB
for touch-screen "button box", K1XM MOAS II USB Switch, TopTen and
KK1L SO2R switches, Green Heron and Hy-Gain rotor controllers, microHam Stack
Switch and StackMax
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