Makrothen RTTY Contest - 2019
Call: AB1J
Operator(s): AB1J
Station: AB1J
Class: SO/Single Xcvr LP
QTH: Waltham MA
Operating Time (hrs): 17:24
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
80: 37
40: 107
20: 145
15: 2
10:
------------
Total: 291 Total Score = 1,212,958
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
Conditions were poor at my latitude. Solar stats 2019-10-12 at 18:00z
SSN=0
eSSN=-6
SFI=69
Kp=2
On Sunday at 12:00z the eSSN was -18. That's way down there.
This is a nice concept contest but each year there are fewer sunspots and seems
like fewer participants. Can't get no distance that way. I think it has the
potential to become a major contest but needs a lot more promotion.
In that regard, I'm always surprised at the lack of deep South American
participation. They should really clean up in the MAK with those long
trans-equatorial paths to the Northern hemisphere population centers in W/VE,
Europe and Japan. I worked only one LU in 2018, none this year and no others
from the region (CE, CX, VP8) either year.
40m and 80m evening distortion was bad and those bands very noisy. I'm always
surprised the decoders can make sense of it all. It offends my ears. Distant
signals in particular were weak and raspy sounding. I added GRITTY into the
decoder mix. That gave me one more vote on calls and exchanges, but no decoder
was perfect. I was looking for a majority report, but with four decoders
sometimes it was a tie. GRITTY has a Makrothen smart mode setting, which I
didn't discover until late in the contest.
The skip was long this year. It was more difficult to work statesiders on 20m
and still difficult to work DX just because it was. My points/QSO this year were
4168.2 vs 3489.2 in 2018, but with far fewer QSOs.
I've built up my own Makrothen call history file over the years, figuring that's
more virtuous than grabbing one from elsewhere. I used it frequently, checking
it twice. K1MK and K2MK are confusing. Also K2MK and K1MK.
It's difficult not to think in terms of mults. Every once in a while I'd get
excited working a new "mult" before realizing there ain't no mults.
I'm a fan of distance contests, but think they could be improved. One idea is to
include handicapping for each QSO which would take into account a polar latitude
factor for the great circle short path, based on the extremes of latitude
involved. For example, the path to Austria from San Francisco would have a
larger multiplying factor because it passes closer to the North Polar region
(about 66N) than my path from Boston (about 55N). Going to Japan, it would work
the other way around, giving me a bump. This is overly simplified and would
take a lot of refinement, but a calculation could be made for every grid loc
pair using computers. Of course, it might not work well at all. Something else
may work better, although we'll never have a world-wide level playing field.
I enjoy thinking about stuff like this. I still think short wave radio is pretty
cool after 61 years on the air.
73,
Ken, AB1J
Flex 6500
N1MM Logger+ MMTTY(narrow) MMTTY(wide) 2Tone(Selective) GRITTY(Makrothen)
20m, 15m & 10m attic dipoles
80m, 40m & 20m outdoor 66' stealth wire, Dentron manual tuner and indoor
counterpoise
LoTW eQSL ClubLog
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
______________________________________________
3830 mailing list
3830@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/3830
|