CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY
Call: W4PK
Operator(s): W4PK
Station: W4PK
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: VA
Operating Time (hrs): 27
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs State/Prov DX Zones
------------------------------------
80: 114 27 24 10
40: 307 37 51 15
20: 561 33 69 25
15: 791 25 80 27
10: 329 14 62 20
------------------------------------
Total: 2102 136 286 97 Total Score = 2,896,539
Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club
Comments:
Conditions were really great this weekend, especially Saturday on 10 Meters!
On Saturday morning I did note on my K3/P3 adapter a broad-band signal above
28100 MHz about 50-75 kHz wide and with spectral lines of about 200 Hz apart.
It had two peaks and it was not local since it was fading. Also, it was not
continuous as it would key up for several seconds and then be silent for
several more seconds. The spectral lines caused problems with decoding in this
region of the band. It was also there on Sunday morning but not nearly as
strong. I assume that this must have been a spread-spectrum signal?
I was using a new (to me) computer with N1MM for this contest and on Saturday
it would mysteriously close all windows except for the N1MM rotor, the two
MMTTY DI engines, and the two 2-tone windows. Of course this would occur only
when I was running stations on both radios! This happened four times on
Saturday, and I apologize to all that I had left hanging. I finally solved it
Saturday evening by going back to doing a full reinstall of the
N1MM-FullInstaller.exe program followed up by the latest version V13.09.00
update. It ran fine all day Sunday without a problem.
I had another problem first thing on Sunday morning when all of a sudden my TX
PTT line remained keyed. I am using one of those Edgeport USB to RS-232 8-port
converters, and since I have already lost one of the RS-232 ports to lightning I
spent a couple of hours trying to figure out was wrong with it. It turned out
not to be the converter but that I had inadvertently programmed the two MMTTY
programs to use the same Com port. Since I had done this at least a couple of
months ago it is a mystery to me why it had worked as long as it did.
My software problems on Saturday and my PTT problem Sunday morning probably
cost me 5-6 hours of operating time! Regardless, I had fun with this contest
and I did do better than last year!
I used spotting assistance from the RTTY skimmers, and I must admit I was
overwhelmed by the number of spots that kept arriving. I had my spot timeout
set for 5 minutes, and even at that setting there were often many calls listed
for each frequency. I know that the skimmers have a hard time distinguishing
between those running and answering calls, and I ended up seldom using the
spots until Sunday afternoon when I finally did find several new multipliers.
Highlights of the contest were while running being called by a JT, a VU,
several YB, ZL, ZS, VK UA0, and many JA's! Lowlights were being called by
quite a few stations who did not put leading and ending spaces around their
calls!
Thanks for all the Q's and for putting up with me mysteriously disappearing on
four occasions Saturday!
73, Sam W4PK
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