CQ WPX RTTY Contest - 2019
Call: NW6P
Operator(s): W9KKN
Station: NW6P
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Cupertino, CA
Operating Time (hrs): 30
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
80: 110
40: 547
20: 741
15: 201
10: ZERO
------------
Total: 1599 Prefixes = 536 Total Score = 1,889,400
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
As always, special thanks to Tom/NW6P for the use of this station..
I fell slightly short of my goal of 2M points, but not by too much. The
secondary goal of beating last year *was* a success. I slightly overslept
Saturday morning and made a strategic error or two in adjusting my off times on
my rate/planning spreadsheet leaving me needing to get rid of an extra hour
toward the end of the contest. By the time I realized that I apparently cant
count hours correctly, many of the better choices had already past. Overall I
had fun, and that's all that matters. A contest like this is exactly what I need
after a stressful week!
The Propagation: Unimpressive.
10m - Checked a few times, but nothing.
15m - Lackluster, but surprising amount of activity
20m - Better opening to EU on Sunday than the one on Saturday, but both weren't
great.
40m - Functional, but not impressive, not really a lot of long path
opportunities to speak of, very very brief EU opening in the evening
80m - noisy, weak
Station:
Despite the rain and overall conditions, everything work and held together
nicely. A few sporadic local noise events to track down, and isolation between
the harmonically-related bands is not what it needs to be yet, which put a drag
on SO2R/2BSIQ for 20/40 and 40/80. It's definitely worse than what I remembered
it being for ARRL RTTY RU, but I also discovered that it's a lot worse when
pointed to JA for whatever reason. Don't worry, I have a plan :)
Equipment:
The Flex behaved itself. No crashes, no corruption, etc.
I managed to fix the low-band drive issues with RF-Kit Amplifier #1 (mentioned
in my ARRL RTTY RU post) -- the input transformer needed to be rewound and
re-soldered. AMP 2 turned out to have a defective control board and its
replacement arrives Monday. AMP 1 really did a good job in this contest,
considering it was completely taken apart on my workbench the day before the
contest with some of its components being temporarily borrowed by AMP 2 for
troubleshooting. These things are so quiet compared to most solid state AMPs
doing continuous RTTY.
Software:
Call stacking in N1MM+ worked a lot better than I remember it working, but still
has a stack error if you try to go too quickly.
Thanks for the Q's everyone, and see you next weekend in ARRL DX CW, where I
plan to remote in for most of it.
73,
Bill/W9KKN
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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