ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: W2BC
Operator(s): W2RU
Station: W2RU
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: WNY
Operating Time (hrs): 34
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 82 45
80: 390 54
40: 841 84
20: 1120 83
15: 942 81
10: 21 13
-------------------
Total: 3396 360 Total Score = 3,666,600
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
A painful week-old pinched nerve kept me guessing about my ability to put in
substantial "chair time" until Friday morning, when I decided to see how things
went. Thanks to a bad case of RF ingress, I had to swap out my latest software
and computer on Friday for my older PC with CT-Win on it.
About 3 hours before the contest I discovered the 20- and 40-meter beams were
about 100 degrees away from where the rotor control said they were. Tests
showed slippage somewhere up topside, but by 1 hour before the contest I had
managed to jockey them into the northeast, where I could only hope any weekend
gusts wouldn't materially change their heading, aimed at Europe.
No sooner had I started the contest when I discovered the main tuning knob on
my transceiver wasn't working properly. Increasingly as the contest
progressed, slowly turning the knob would not change my frequency; only rapid
spins would allow me to QSY! This made S&P a little dicey, but if there was
ever a contest to focus on Running, this was it!
Actually, between the beams "fixed" at 45 degrees and the main tuning knob, my
strategy boiled down to a simple three-step process:
1. Find the highest band where it looked like I could keep a reasonable Run
rate going; and
2. Find a semi-clear frequency for Running.
3. When I couldn't Run any more, go looking for multipliers on the (open)
band with the lowest total relative to what I thought I should have on that
band at that particular time in the contest period. Even so, my 20-meter
multipliers were well behind both 40 and 15 until late Sunday, when a concerted
effort to chase down all the CA/SA/Pacific DXpeditions paid off.
Some personal milestones from this contest:
* Never worked a JA opening on 20 with the beam aimed at Europe before!
* Never worked so many JAs on 40 at one sitting before -- and certainly not
with the beam aimed at Europe!
* Beat my previous "personal best" for this event by about 3 dB!
Many times I noticed the 10-minute Rate meter in CT over 200. My best
"calendar" hour was 1300-1400Z Saturday morning, with 184 QSOs on 20.
Runner-up hours were 1200-1400Z Sunday morning on 15, with 168 and 161.
Sometimes I had five QSOs logged in a single clock minute but the drone of the
very deep pile-ups actually slowed things down during what might have been even
bigger hours.
Slept both nights, so never did collect many low-band Pacific multipliers.
I had planned on climbing the tower Saturday afternoon, when things
traditionally get very slow here, to see if I could fix the slippage problem.
But things never did get slow, and I never did climb the tower until Monday,
although the beams were still in the northeast, where I had left them.
Antennas:
160: 90-foot top-loaded, shunt-fed Rohn 45 tower
80: Dipole @ 70 feet
40: M2 40M2LL @ 98 feet fixed on Europe
20: CC 20-4CD @ 92 feet fixed on Europe + CC A-4 @ 30 feet
15: CC 15-4CD @ 60 feet + same CC A-4
10: Same CC A-4
Low-band RX: 300-ft Beverage for Europe
Bud, W2RU (operator, W2BC)
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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