CQWW WPX Contest, CW
Call: WQ8RP
Operator(s): N8XX
Station: KD8HNF
Class: SOAB QRP
QTH: MI
Operating Time (hrs): 22.5
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 0
80: 0
40: 97
20: 214
15: 88
10: 16
------------
Total: 415 Prefixes = 266 Total Score = 203,756
Club: Mad River Radio Club
Comments:
A learning experience, combined with lousy conditions, especially on 20, 15, 10
meters. Bob, KD8HNF had set up a remote operation on one of the higher hills
in Ionia County (if you count anything in that county as "high") He
has a spider beam and a G5RV antenna, and the place is generally quite quiet
for RFI.
To improve the station, Bob bought a couple of "dedicated computer
controlled boxes" one which plugs into the control head, and the other
into the rig at the remote site. This effort didn't come to fruition until a
day before the contest, so we both decided that physical QSY to the remote site
was the best, since learning how the station under remote control works plus
trying to compete in a could be disastrous.
In retrospect, it wouldn't have mattered much, because bands were very noisy,
even on 20, 15, and 10 meters and propagation was "interesting" to
say the very least. At first I thought something noisy was at the site, but in
a few contacts with locals, they were having the same problem. And, the gods
which control the ionosphere, (maybe the Egyptian Sun God Aten?) weren't
smiling on us, and these bands were "rotten, miserable, to almost
tolerable" in phases. All of them were noisy on Saturday! The maximum
length of a "run" after calling CQ for as long as 10 minutes might be
3 or 4 Q's. After the fact, it appears that very few of my signals made it
above the noise level at the skimmers on the Reverse Beacon Network, because 2
dB above the noise level was typical, and 10 dB or higher was very seldom.
One other complication was that I saw a nice Compaq computer at the site, It
has 2.6 GHz Pentium and 1 gig memory, more computing power than my Dell Laptop,
and was right at the operating position. So, we loaded N1MM on it, hooked the
TS-480-SAT to it and tested it. Initial testing was satisfactory, so it was
"all go." Yup, "all go" until about 2 hours into the
contest when it slooowwwweeeddd down to a crawl. Sending CW was very marginal,
commands between the rig and the computer and vice versa took seconds.
Rebooting the computer was the only thing which resolved the slowness. After a
couple of these events, I looked a the Windows Task Manager and noted that much
of the time 100% of the CPU capacity was being used. At that point I decided
to take a break, brought out my trusty laptop, connected it to the TS-480 and
never looked back.
So, even with a hex beam, which should have provided something like 6 dBd on
20/15/10, and a G5RV, similar to my inverted V at home, this year was less
productive than last year. After the first evening, I decided that there was
no way I was going to beat any records, So, plan "B" went into
effect. I used the motto my pappy told me, when I wasn't even knee high to a
grasshopper, who always said, "Do the best you can with whatever you
got."
High points was working Europe on 40 meters with a cloud warmer G5RV antenna,
working several fellow club members who were various places in the Caribbean
and having quite a few ops who know me asked "QRP?" The final high
point was when I worked a fellow QRP op Dale, WC7S out in Wyoming on 20 meters
who was in a midst of what appeared to be a great run on the low end of the
band. The camaraderie of these events makes up for the sometimes monotony of a
10 Hour during lull in propagation.
Thanks to the organizers of CQ WPX. Thanks to all the folks who took time to
pull my signal out of the noisy bands. (Of course, for most, if not all these
contacts it gave a new multiplier, at least during the first contact on the
first band!) Thanks to KD8HNF for the use of his remote site. And thanks to
the Michigan QRP Club for the use of WQ8RP, the club call! Folks tell me that
a "unique prefix" adds 10 dB to a signal, and, during this event, I
needed every dB possible!
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