North American QSO Party, RTTY - February
Call: N6ZFO
Operator(s): N6ZFO
Station: N6ZFO
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 10
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
80: 60 31
40: 140 42
20: 35 22
15: 152 46
10: 67 21
-------------------
Total: 454 162 Total Score = 73,548
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Team: NCCC #1
Comments:
10m was unproductive, but I stuck with it for mults. When I went to 15m, where
I made 520 Q's and 94 countries in last weekend's DX test, the SWR was nearly
infinity. What does one do? Well, thinking I might have to ditch the use of
the 15 m beam, I simply kept going using the 10m Yagi on 15m. . and got a
surprising number of Q's. About 3 hours in, I took exactly half an hour off to
attempt repairs. Tromping through poison oak, I found a horrible mistake on my
part -- a coax union that had never been wx sealed. The light rain we had Fri
night pushed it over the edge. When I wrenched it apart, the barrel connector
(a high quality one) disintegrated. Luckily, one PL-238 was ok and the 2nd
coax line had a taped union nearby, so I was able to patch the 15 m feedline
into the 160 m line going to the shack, avoiding a time-consuming soldering
project in the middle of poison oak. The fix worked. I went on for a
respectable total on 15. The cost was lost time on 20 meters. But using the
philosophy of playing your strengths, I decided to get the most out of 15 and
pretty much ditch 20. The order for new coax will go in tomorrow.
Not the end of the troubles. At about 250 Q's, WL began to crash
unpredictably. Remembering I'd seen a "Low on Virtual Memory" message, I
increased it to the max allowed on XP. That seemed to cure the problem,
fortunately, and WL performed well to the end.
40 and 80 were moderately productive with several sustained runs on both bands
at 60-80/hr. The score went from 41,500 to 73,500 in under two hours at the
end.
For the first time, though, I felt comfortable using RTTY up to a 120 rate.
Now need to build SO2R for next one.
73 Bill n6zfo
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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