_____________________________________________
From: yccc@groups.io <yccc@groups.io> On Behalf Of Chet, N8RA
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2019 2:15 PM
To: yccc@groups.io; vhfcontesting@contesting.com
Subject: [yccc] FW: ARRL Sep VHF N8RA Single Op LP
ARRL September VHF Contest - 2019
Call: N8RA
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: CT FN31tl
Operating Time (hrs): 14
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 109 21
2: 103 30
222: 24 13
432: 20 10
-------------------
Total: 256 74 Total Score = 22,200
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
Fun weekend! Activity was good but often snoozy. It was very satisfying to
log some good DX on my 4 lower bands. Best DX: 6M-350 mi on ssb and FT8,
2M-575 mi on FT8, 222-300 mi on cw, 432-220 mi on ssb.
The grid count on 2M hit a new high thanks to FT8 and to another antenna
added this summer. This new antenna is a side mounted 4 stack of small yagis
fixed toward the "money direction": SW down the east coast to cover NYC, NJ,
Philly, DC. A homebrew A-B-Both remote switch allowed working two directions
at a time with instant switching between the fixed and a rotating antenna.
Finding stations this way is much more fun than getting directions on
directions from a chat page, which I did not bother to check into.
Below is the beautiful 3D bar chart from N1MM+ showing SSB was still my
dominant mode but FT8 being very important too. If I had spent more time on
FT8 maybe the bars would change top spots, but SSB allows chatting with
neighbors and regulars, a nice part of this event.
XXX
For those unable to view the chart, the breakdown is SSB 256 Q's, FT8 101
Q's, and CW 5 Q's.
The mandatory excuses:
The shack was not ready. It had been completely torn apart this spring to
allow me to build a decent semi-finished basement cave for it. This included
adding ground sheeting to the desk and the shelves for all the
interconnecting cables to rest on to mitigate noise and cross coupling
problems. 90% was back together, but well, the last 10% seemed to be taking
forever. It did not help that I was away most of last week, so Friday was a
rush to finish wiring, testing, and getting the WSJT-X / N1MM+ marriage set
up. At the end of the day, it all seemed to be working fine, or so I
thought.
Woke up Saturday morning with a stuffy head cold of course.
An hour before the start, I came to the shack to turn everything on. The
amplifier on 432 refused to produce any power, so the 432 radio had to be
used barefoot with only about 5 watts out.
Big goofs and apologies:
Coming back to FT8 Sunday afternoon on 2M, for some reason the radio stayed
in USB and I did not notice that the speech processor was still on resulting
in compressed audio overdriving the amplifier. Very sorry for the resultant
garbage. Thank you to someone who changed their FT8 message to tell me.
Another time, I got my audio streams mixed up so that I was decoding 2M
signals but thinking they were on 6M. So callers never got a response from
me on the band they were calling on. Ooops, sorry for wasting your time and
for perhaps stepping on someone thinking my chosen CQ spot was clear.
Unsolved Mysteries
When turning on everything an hour before the contest, the Elecraft 222 MHz
transverter that is controlled by the K3 would not produce any RF. Checked
over all the connections etc. to no avail. As a last resort, I recycled
power to the K3 and that fixed it- but why?
Noticed once when operating WSJT-X from within N1MM+, a message popped up
saying something about a problem with the rig control interface to the K3.
The green all-is-OK dot turned pink for a minute or two and then went back
to green.
A couple of times after returning from FT8 to SSB, the dueling CQs on 6 and
2 got stuck. Was it me having not switched the serial port correctly or
what? Shutting down N1MM+ and restarting it got it going again.
I need to comb through all my WSJT configurations; standalone and invoked
from within N1MM+ on two separate computers. Clearly somewhere they are
inconsistent and sometimes the wrong radio mode got set.
CU in the next one.
73,
Chet, N8RA
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