North American QSO Party, RTTY
Call: W6YX
Operator(s): K6ENT, W6ZZZ, N6DE
Station: W6YX
Class: M/2 LP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 12
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
80: 34 19
40: 88 40
20: 210 51
15: 107 44
10: 7 2
-------------------
Total: 446 156 Total Score = 69,576
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Equipment:
Station #1: Yaesu FT-1000MP, Hal DXP38, MMTTY
Station #2: Kenwood TS-850, Hal P38, MMTTY
Station #3: Icom 756Pro, MMTTY
All stations were networked using Writelog v10.31C, and had rig control.
Antennas:
10M: 6 el Telrex @ 70', 5 el HyGain 105CA @ 30'
15M: 6 el Telrex @ 70', 5 el HyGain 155CA @ 25'
20M: 6 el KLM @ 60', 5 el HyGain 205CA @ 40'
40M: 2 el Cushcraft 40-2CD @ 50'
80M: inverted vee @ 60'
KLM KT34XA @ 60'
Mosley PRO67A @ 60'
Story:
Wow, was this a lot of fun or what? The three of us had a great time. We
decided to get crazy with the setup this time with three stations, and dual
decode on two. The idea was to have a third station to listen for band
activity, scout mults, pass mults to, and transmit when one of us wanted to take
a break. Unfortunately we could not gain the full benefit of this station, as
there were rarely two bands open and active at the same time, let alone three
bands! Still, Marc made great use of his 756Pro on 40m in FSK mode using the
RTTY filters.
The solar flare obviously hurt us badly out here on the west coast. I saw notes
by others that the flare was felt at about 2105Z. It seemed to arrive much
earlier for us, as things really declined at 2021Z. There would be 10 seconds
to a few minutes of time where the bands would open, but they'd quickly close
again (as Doug N6TQS similarly noted). It was not until about 2230Z that 20m
reasonably recovered. This was over a two hour blackout period for us!
Additionally, 15m never seemed to recover. We only had about 15 QSOs on that
band after the flare. We tried passing many mults to that band from 20m, but we
were largely unsuccessful because of the band conditions.
Looking back, we were very happy that we got off to a decent start on 15m. Even
at the beginning, the band seemed tremendously quiet. I tuned to SSB and found
a 1-land station calling CQ and commenting that he was checking to see if his
station was working because the band seemed so quiet! As for 10m, it was a
complete wasteland. Very disappointing. We could only contact CA, HI, and
PJ2EL.
Despite the solar flare and 10m conditions, I was very pleased with our results!
We had a lot of enthusiasm and a good strategy. We did better on 20m and 80m
this year, had 7 more multipliers, and were only 3,700 points off of last year's
claimed score! Our 34 QSOs and 19 mults on 80m is definitely cause for great
celebration from the west coast in this contest! It has been mind boggling to
read the huge 40m/80m totals from midwest/east coast stations.
Our congratulations go to the N0AC M/2 team which put up a tremendous score!
We completely missed MT, NV, DE, SD, and a bunch of VEs. I heard VY1MB and
VE5SF briefly on the bands, but we never ended up making a QSO with them. KD4K
in GA was tuning around 20m in the last hour of the contest. We managed to
catch his attention, much to our delight!
While setting up a few days before the contest, we encountered a puzzling MMTTY
plug-in installation problem. Whenever we executed the plug-in setup file, we
got the following message: "Setup failed to launch installation engine: no such
interface supported." It turns out that this error message is documented on the
InstallShield web site, and there is a list of 14 possible items which can
cause this problem:
http://support.installshield.com/kb/view.asp?articleid=Q104985
Our problem was #9. The computer was missing the stdole32.tlb file (it had a
file named stdole32_o.tlb instead). We copied this file from another Windows95
machine, and suddenly the MMTTY plug-in installed without any further problems!
Thanks to Steve W1SRD who pointed us in this direction, otherwise we would have
never figured it out!
Kent K6ENT also performed quite a bit of debug while trying to get a USB-serial
converter to work with Writelog. He solved the problem, and got rig control and
FSK to interface with it. In the process, he found some very interesting
idiosyncrasies with this particular converter, and is relaying this data to
AA5AU for the USB-serial help file on Don's page.
Thanks for all the QSOs!
73...
-Dean - N6DE
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