CQWW WPX Contest, SSB
Call: WM5R
Operator(s): WM5R
Station: W5KFT
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): 4.25
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160:
80:
40:
20:
15:
10:
------------
Total: 0 Prefixes = 0 Total Score = 1
Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club
Comments:
I got off to my best start ever in this contest. I was well over 600 QSOs at
0400 UTC when I began hearing thunder and seeing lightning in the distance. I
started paying attention to the weather radar and decided that I needed to shut
down the station around 0420 UTC. In the process of rapidly disconnecting
everything, I think I stepped on the power strip for the PC and shut it off
rather abruptly. I kept watching the weather radar on my smartphone. The
lightning got to be pretty intense by 0500 UTC, as the storm cell went directly
overhead. I lost power briefly on two occasions.
We took a near or maybe even direct hit sometime after 0500 UTC. It was one of
those strike where the lightning and thunder were (to my senses) simultaneous
and I involuntarily became airborne for a moment. There was a lot of static
discharge at the bulkhead, and I was staying well clear of that side of the
building. I was without power at 0600 UTC when I decided to try to sleep a
little - because what else could I do? When I woke up a few hours later, the
power was back on. I booted up the PC and discovered that my log was gone. The
file was there on disk, zero bytes, with a timestamp from before the contest.
Maybe I need to figure out what SMARTDRIVE is supposed to be doing on that PC,
as it looks like for more than four hours it never wrote the log to disk. In 12
years of using TR Log, I've never lost a log before, even with sudden power
loss.
When I started checking things out, I thought the situation was pretty bad, as
I wasn't immediately able to put power out on one of the radios, but it turns
out only a few things actually died. An IC in one of the Top Ten band decoders
exploded, COM2 in the PC is dead, there are some LED issues in the other band
decoder and a band pass filter, and a blown fuse (no spares on hand) in the
SixPak control box. I spent a long time checking out antennas, rotors, amps,
radios, switch boxes, the DX Doubler, etc. and those all seem to be OK.
Next year.
Video I took during the first power outage using my cell phone:
http://www.wm5r.org/contest/2008_wpx_phone/
[Note: the WA7BNM form is forcing me to claim a score greater than zero].
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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