California QSO Party - 2019
Call: NS6T
Operator(s): W6RGG NS6T
Station: NS6T
Class: M/SCntyExp LP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs): 25
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs
--------------------
160:
80: 28 76
40: 43 70
20: 298 263
15: 32 3
10:
6:
2:
--------------------
Total: 401 412 Mults = 56 Total Score = 113,512
Club:
Comments:
This last minute county expedition came together through
generosity and advice from many sources. Dean N6DE called for
volunteers and loaned us his Force12 tribander and high power
inverted-V's for 40m, 75m and 80m. Dean also provided valuable
advice on setup and operations. US Tower provided us with
accommodations in their guest house and provided us with an
awesome portable tower. Their knowledgeable and friendly staff
helped us with the tower operations, loaned us some tools we were
lacking, and even provided us with a fishing pole to help get
some ropes over the guest house. Alan AD6E, who operated from
this location before, helped us with the planning.
The team consisted of Bob W6RGG and Tom NS6T. We had some
challenges during setup, and we didn't get on the air in time for
the Friday practice time or the following net. By sunset on
Friday, we had the tribander and 40m inverted-V in place. We put
up the 80m and 75m inverted-V's Saturday morning.
After setting up the rigs and connecting to the antennas, we
discovered that NS6T's amplifier wasn't working. We couldn't
adjust it to a point where the SWR was nominal. The amplifier
hadn't been used for a couple years, so it's not surprising that
there were issues. Hence, we decided to run low power.
Other than the amplifier, everything else worked fine except that
N1MM+ Enter Send Mode (ESM) was behaving weirdly for CW. It
seemed to be sending some gibberish characters in addition to the
expected exchange sequence when using ESM. The work around was to
press F1 (CQ) and then press F2 (Exch) after putting in the
received callsign.
We also seemed to have a little trouble when operating on
40m. Transmitting on 40m seemed to disrupt our USB->COM port
adapter. Getting the rig CAT cable working again required a
reboot or complex COM port re-initialization process.
Re-positioning the USB->COM port adapter away from the antenna
coax resolved the problem.
Overall, conditions were about what we expected. 20m was very
productive, and 15m had little to offer. 40m and 80m were both
about equal. Bob W6RGG was the CW operator, and Tom NS6T operated
phone. Despite being low power, we had some fun pile ups.
Our operating situation was very comfortable. We had a table in
the US Tower guest house, and the antenna wires came in through
the window. We had all the comforts of home.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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