*********** 1996(?) POISSON D'AVRIL RESULTS W9SZ ************
After watching "The Time Machine", all 3 "Back To The Future" films,
and "Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure" about 50 times each, I
finally figured out how to achieve time travel. "And just in time",
I said to myself, "this will be perfect for the Poisson d'Avril
Contest - I can work every station ever licensed!"
I decided to enter in the Very Extremely Limited MultiOperator
(VELMO) category. This meant I had to recruit a couple operators.
It wasn't a difficult task - I went back and contacted Hiram Percy
Maxim, W1AW ("The Old Man") and Clarence D. Tuska, 1WD ("The Young
Squirt"), who were more than willing to be guest ops. I also
contacted Nikola Tesla, but he didn't want to participate as he had
never been licensed. He did, however, want to contribute, and gave
us the secrets of his scalar interferometer (the infamous "death ray")
so we could invoke the rule which would give us bonus points for
destroying the other station's transmitter right after the QSO.
Now that we had a team, we had to decide on what rules we wanted to
follow. (Rules? We don't need no stinking rules!) We did decide on a
few:
(1) We would only operate from 0000Z to 2400Z of April 1, 1996 per
my "real-time" clock.
(2) We would only work stations on April 1 of the years 1900-1996
(no future QSOs relative to 1996.)
(3) We would use no equipment from the future (past 1996).
(4) We would only work stations present in the existing amateur
bands for the year we were operating in.
We then needed a few pieces of equipment to make the station
complete. "The Doctor" from QST was willing to lend us his
Gee-TOR equipment so we could work spark-gap in the vicinity of
a logging computer (he assured us it was the prototype and the only
one existing at the time.) We found a special spectrum monitor which
would interface to the computer and the time machine in such a way
as to rapidly scan the spectrum and lock onto any station it found
in a ham band (The Ultimate S&P!) We located a 1-Gigawatt transmitter
abandoned by Radio Moscow in Albania which we moved to East Central
Illinois for the contest site (finally the Black Hole would be
illuminated!) We interfaced my version of Tesla's death ray so it
would destroy the station we just worked with the push of the F13 key
on the keyboard.
Finally, all was set up and we eagerly awaited the start of the
contest. Since a human had to actually make the contact in this
contest, The Old Man would work the station the time/spectrum
analyzer found, I would log it (I was the one most familiar with
computer logging), and Clarence would push the F13 key.
We began right on the dot at 0000Z with the year 1900. Not too
many to work there, so we rapidly proceeded to 1901 and through
the early years. We skipped the war years, knowing there would
be no radio amateurs active then. When we got past WWII, things
really started to hop ... we were furiously working our respective
functions to accomplish as many QSOs as we could. We finally
finished in 1996, just as my clock came to the end of 2359Z.
We were weary but exuberant, knowing that we had won!
Here are a few highlights of the contest (or lowlights, as the
case may be):
- Who is this "Larson E. Rapp WIOU" character? He certainly was
persistent. He kept showing up in our logs even though we had
destroyed his equipment each year before. I think we finally
finished him off, though - we didn't find him in the later years.
- We tried to work the Russian Woodpecker but all it would do
was just keep pecking. So we destroyed it with Tesla's death ray
for good measure. I claim an extra bonus of 3 X 10E8 points for
that (you all owe me for it!)
- We occasionally came across a big DX pileup and had a blast
working all the stations in the pileup ... but for some reason
they would only work us if we used calls like ZK2AU, VR8B or
3V8AS. If you have us in your log, "You're a dupe, OM!" (In all
meanings of the word.) I invoke the little-known rule which
claims 10,000 points for each such "dupe QSO".
So here's the final breakdown (at least, here's what came out
of the computer, it's one of them Pentium 90's what's got an
occasional math error) (and some spark gap RF may have gotten in
too, as well) (and a couple splashes of Old Crow):
435,758,623,404 QSOs X 90 years operated X 46 bands X 5,000 pts
per QSO = 9.0202 X 10E18 points
7,288 "dupe QSOs" X 10,000 points = 72,880,000 points
Bonus for destruction of Russian Woodpecker = 3 X 10E8 points
Bonus for VELMO category = 1 point.
Multiplying all these together, we get our final score:
1.972177294 X 10E35 points !
This is to certify that in this contest we have operated
our transmitter haphazardly and have observed fully the rules
and regulations of the contest which we ourselves have made
up and that we have blatantly ignored and/or violated all
other contest rules.
Zack W9SZ
Hiram W1AW
Clarence 1WD
P.S. How do I submit my logs? They are on a 50 googolbyte hard drive.
(What can I say? It came with the Gee-TOR machine!)
P.P.S. The Old Man is writing a new book, ROTTEN CONTESTING ...
coming soon to a bookstore near you!
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