IARU HF Championship
Call: WC1M
Operator(s): WC1M
Station: WC1M
Class: SO CW Power: HP Radios: SO2R
QTH: NH
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Mults
-----------------------------------
160: 0 0
80: 17 8
40: 209 34
20: 893 57
15: 686 53
10: 19 13
-----------------------------------
Total: 1824 0 165 = 1,206,810
Club: YCCC
Comments:
Band Antenna
160 nada
80 inv vee @65'
40 4-square
20 TH-7 @70', C3E @50' (two towers)
15 TH-7 @70', C3E @50' (two towers)
10 TH-7 @70', C3E @50' (two towers)
EQUIPMENT: FT-1000mp & Alpha 87A / FT-990 & LK550-ZC / Writelog
COMMENTS:
This is one of the best contest of the year. As many have observed, 24 hours is
a great format for a DX contest. Except for 10M and 15M the second morning, you
only get one shot at each opening. That makes it critical to catch the openings
before it's too late. The other great feature is that an aging boomer like me
can last 24 hours without much trouble. That helps level the playing field a
little. Finally, it seems like participation has been growing each year, with
more HQ stations and WRTC adding to the fire. I had a ball.
Once again, my score improved over last year but I didn't do as well as I'd
hoped. I guess it's good for one's reach to exceed one's grasp. The main
problem was, as always, multipliers. It's embarassing to have one of the higher
QSO totals and be far enough behind on mults to be four or five slots below
where ops with similar QSO counts are. I really made an effort to chase mults
this time, and did pretty well on the HQ stations. But I probably lost a few
zones by not thinking enough about Africa during the day and the South Pacific
at night. I pounded the second radio pretty good, but probably should have
spent more time doing pure S&P (easier to concentrate when you're not running
at the same time.)
These days, fellow NH station KR1G and I tend to score in the same ballpark and
we exchange rate sheets so we can both improve. A quick comparison of my
summary with KR1G's shows the difference between us in mults was 160 and 80
again. We were two mults apart on 40-10, but I lost 16 to him on 160 and 80.
Looks like we were very close in HQ stations, so I lost it mostly on zones.
Actually, it was the 12 mults he got on 80 that did me in. He's really gonna
kill me when he gets that 4-square playing! My plan is to put up a delta loop
this fall, which will run rings around my old inverted vee. But it won't stand
up to a 4-square. I might run a single beverage NE, too. Should be able to run
a 600-footer. I need to throw something up for 160 just to grab those last few
mults. If he's going to keep beating me like this, I'm going to have to move to
Vermont so I can win the section again!
I did OK in the QSO department, but I lost a bunch of time at the start with a
raft of stupid technical problems. I didn't start checking out the station
until 45 minutes before the contest and discovered that the DCU-1 rotor
controller got uncalibrated, probably due to a long power failure a couple of
weeks ago. Had to yank it out of the system and run down the hill to the tower
to recalibrate. Then the Nye peak-reading wattmeter on the LK550 wouldn't work
and I can't retune quickly without it. After losing more time troubleshooting,
had to yank the wattmeter off the other radio and splice it in. Then I
discoverd that a keyboard macro I use to switch WriteLog in and out of stereo
had stopped working. That's a critical function, so I had to fix it. Tracked it
down to W5XD removing a command from one of the menus, which screwed up the
number of down arrow commands the macros needed to execute the split/normal
commands. Took a while to fix because the remapper kept crashing Windows every
time I displayed the macros. Finally found a different way to edit them. The
recalibration problem got me started about 10 minutes late, and I lost the rest
of the time on the wattmeter and remapper problems after the contest got
underway. The worse problem was that I was going to use the 45 minutes before
the contest to setup food and drinks, but had to burn contest time doing that
around noon (I was really hungry!) All in all, I'd have been better off not
eating at all during the contest.
That's the last time I'll leave checking the station to the last minute! I
probably lost about 45 minutes altogether, but it came at the worst time --
during the first four hours. I knew I was in trouble because I had studied
K5ZD's rate sheet from '98 and could see that my rate on 15 wasn't close to
keeping up.
I don't think conditions were as good this year as last year. I had 1781 Qs and
151 mults in 21.5 hours last year. I had the extra beam and was more efficient
this year, so probably conditions were to blame for the meager improvement.
I was pretty happy with my CW copy. That, and better knowledge of propagation
are the two skill areas that mean the most to me.
See you next year!
73, Dick WC1M
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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