CQ WW RTTY WPX Contest
Call: P49X
Operator(s): W0YK
Station: P49Y/P40L
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Aruba
Operating Time (hrs): 30
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Pts
------------------
80: 493 2940
40: 1078 6446
20: 1074 3205
15: 606 1799
10: 0 0
------------------
Total: 3251 14390 Prefixes = 808 Total Score = 11,627,120
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
This result is a surprise. Friday night conditions were terrible here and
throughout the weekend the bands were be up and down. The worst was Sunday
mid-day when I put in my last four hours and 15m disappeared completely for
a while and never recovered fully. Even 20m almost crashed. It seemed that
I had to ask for repeats in every QSO.
I just dug in as hard as I could and amazingly ended my first 9-1/2 hours at
my first break with exactly the same QSOs and points as the past two years!
Still, I was rather discouraged about the prospects for the rest of the
weekend. I barely kept pace with a couple of Stateside stations on serial
numbers Friday night and early Saturday, but at least Aruba wasn't as
deprived as the 2008 WPX CW where signals were either weak or non-existent.
Saturday was the best day for conditions here. The low bands were their
usual pleasure Saturday night, a huge contrast to Friday. Signals were
clear and crisp and the QRM seemed much less. I don't know about Sunday in
total, but the four hours I operated were extremely marginal. I was
counting on 140/hour rates and fought to stay above 80/hour. When 15m
disappeared in the middle of my run, the only signal I heard on the band was
P40R and even Roger was weak, just 8 miles away. Slowly one or two European
signals started popping in again and I got some more of it before my 30
hours ran out. I even checked 40m and almost QSY'd there at 16Z!
The point total ended up a bit above my all-time high in 2007 but the real
boost came from nearly 100 more mults. I was stunned at the 808 prefix
total.
It will be interesting to see how others did on prefixes. Maybe there were
just more available this year. Never did use Packet because I was averaging
a mult every four QSOs and it just didn't pay to leave the run frequencies
to chase mults. Not to mention the fact that I never got the RFI out of the
DSL modem on 40 and 80, so the Internet connection was QRM'd and destroyed
by my operating.
I modified my off-time strategy from prior years and stopped operating only
when the Q rate dropped below 65-70/hour on 80/40m and 140/hour on 20/15m.
This meant that my prior 2-hour break late Saturday afternoon disappeared.
It also resulted in me refraining from getting started Saturday morning
until 15Z when 20m and 15m should be solidly open. Although harder on the
body, I think the operating time was better optimized. I'm sure glad I
didn't leave more than four hours for Sunday this weekend!
I tried a non-intuitive change in my TU message this year by lengthening it
and always send the other station's call sign. My thought was to lessen
confusion on the frequency and based on this weekend's conditions, I'm
really glad I did that. At 60 WPM, it doesn't add much time and I could get
rid of the 'DE' that I usually use to help listeners sort out who was doing
what on frequency.
Other than Windows going berserk a half-dozen times, the entire station
worked
flawlessly: equipment, computers, software, modems, network, accessories,
transmitting antennas, Beverages, primary power, light bulbs, etc. There
was zero interstation RFI and the Beverages really helped divide up the
pileups geographically on the low bands. Once in a while, Window throws a
fit by flashing all the open windows on and off and zooming the cursor
randomly around the screen without help from the trackball. One just has to
back away from the keyboard and trackball and "let it pass". Whenever I've
tried to intervene, really bad consequences occur. The last time it
happened was just after K5ZD sent his exchange on 15m Sunday and in my panic
I reached for "the key" like I would on CW before I realized this mode
doesn't have such a computer override/safeguard.
Another first for me was how much better the DXP38 decoded compared to MMTTY
much of the time. I've never experienced such a difference between the two.
Granted I didn't take time to play around with different MMTTY profiles with
variouse decoding algorithms in these odd atomospheric conditions. The call
signs and serial numbers were garbled so often in MMTTY that I took to using
the DXP38 decoding windows as my main focus. Coincidently, for the first
time I used some high performance sound card units (EMU-0202) to drive
MMTTY. I thought they worked great, but in the past I've just used the
internal sound cards in my 10-year old laptops with no problems. I'm
thinking it wasn't worth the trouble to drag these extras boxes down here.
Maybe it was just conditions and maybe it would have been worse without the
external units. I really don't think sound card performance matters so much
in RTTY, but for some of the other data modes like PSK, perhaps there is an
advantage.
So, as always big thanks to the endless supply of RTTY contesters,
especially the casual folks who get on and create an endless supply of QSOs
for us mutants. As well, huge appreciation to John, W6LD/P40L, and Andy,
AE6Y/P49Y, for sharing their wonderful contest station with me. Each of
them, BTW, got on with their K3s in CW-RTTY mode and worked me. This is a
cute feature but a bit awkward for high rate contesting. I worked six
stations on the other radio while waiting for them to send 30 wpm CW
translated to 60 wpm "Farnsworth"
RTTY. Actually, Andy tried twice unsuccessfully sending only the MARK
frequency. We need to enroll that boy in RTTY Contesting 101, hi! And
finally, I couldn't have done this contest without the loan of an Alpha 86
from P40YL and P40V who have moved back to the island part time now. In
fact, its time to pop the cork on some wine and get ready for a post-contest
dinner somewhere with them tonight.
For the analytics among us, data is below.
Ed - P49X (W0YK)
80M 40M 20M 15M 10M Total %
NA 292 576 656 500 0 2024 62.3
EU 186 439 355 83 0 1063 32.7
AF 4 5 2 3 0 14 0.4
SA 7 10 15 18 0 50 1.5
AS 4 43 45 0 0 92 2.8
OC 0 5 1 2 0 8 0.2
QSO/Pref by hour and band
Hour 80M 40M 20M 15M 10M Total Cumm OffTime
D1-0000Z 17/12 70/63 --+-- --+-- --+-- 87/75 87/75
D1-0100Z 37/18 86/54 - - - 123/72 210/147
D1-0200Z 25/10 84/40 - - - 109/50 319/197
D1-0300Z 36/20 75/40 - - - 111/60 430/257
D1-0400Z 62/25 83/42 - - - 145/67 575/324
D1-0500Z 51/17 73/23 - - - 124/40 699/364
D1-0600Z 42/12 56/21 - - - 98/33 797/397
D1-0700Z 47/13 44/11 - - - 91/24 888/421
D1-0800Z 18/2 47/15 --+-- --+-- --+-- 65/17 953/438
D1-0900Z 5/1 22/9 - - - 27/10 980/448 30
D1-1000Z - - - - - 0/0 980/448 60
D1-1100Z - - - - - 0/0 980/448 60
D1-1200Z - - - - - 0/0 980/448 60
D1-1300Z - - - - - 0/0 980/448 60
D1-1400Z - - 88/16 67/14 - 155/30 1135/478
D1-1500Z - - 75/13 87/3 - 162/16 1297/494
D1-1600Z --+-- --+-- 85/22 72/10 --+-- 157/32 1454/526
D1-1700Z - - 74/18 65/4 - 139/22 1593/548
D1-1800Z - - 83/22 58/10 - 141/32 1734/580
D1-1900Z - - 74/15 73/9 - 147/24 1881/604
D1-2000Z - - 72/15 62/5 - 134/20 2015/624
D1-2100Z - 34/9 73/9 12/2 - 119/20 2134/644
D1-2200Z - 52/14 71/10 - - 123/24 2257/668
D1-2300Z - 53/11 61/13 - - 114/24 2371/692
D2-0000Z --+-- 38/13 53/7 --+-- --+-- 91/20 2462/712
D2-0100Z 19/4 31/6 10/0 - - 60/10 2522/722
D2-0200Z 22/2 52/5 - - - 74/7 2596/729
D2-0300Z 24/0 62/6 - - - 86/6 2682/735
D2-0400Z 36/2 55/9 - - - 91/11 2773/746
D2-0500Z 26/2 41/6 - - - 67/8 2840/754
D2-0600Z 26/0 20/2 - - - 46/2 2886/756 15
D2-0700Z - - - - - 0/0 2886/756 60
D2-0800Z --+-- --+-- --+-- --+-- --+-- 0/0 2886/756 60
D2-0900Z - - - - - 0/0 2886/756 60
D2-1000Z - - - - - 0/0 2886/756 60
D2-1100Z - - - - - 0/0 2886/756 60
D2-1200Z - - - - - 0/0 2886/756 60
D2-1300Z - - - - - 0/0 2886/756 60
D2-1400Z - - 1/0 10/2 - 11/2 2897/758 52
D2-1500Z - - 65/10 19/2 - 84/12 2981/770
D2-1600Z --+-- --+-- 68/12 11/2 --+-- 79/14 3060/784
D2-1700Z - - 74/8 40/6 - 114/14 3174/798
D2-1800Z - - 47/7 30/3 - 77/10 3251/808
Total: 493/1401078/3991074/197 606/72 0/0
Pts by hour and band.
80M 40M 20M 15M 10M Total Cumm OffTime
D1-0000Z 102 420 ---+- ---+- ---+- 522 522
D1-0100Z 216 514 - - - 730 1252
D1-0200Z 146 502 - - - 648 1900
D1-0300Z 216 450 - - - 666 2566
D1-0400Z 372 496 - - - 868 3434
D1-0500Z 306 436 - - - 742 4176
D1-0600Z 252 332 - - - 584 4760
D1-0700Z 282 264 - - - 546 5306
D1-0800Z 108 282 ---+- ---+- ---+- 390 5696
D1-0900Z 30 132 - - - 162 5858 30
D1-1000Z - - - - - 0 5858 60
D1-1100Z - - - - - 0 5858 60
D1-1200Z - - - - - 0 5858 60
D1-1300Z - - - - - 0 5858 60
D1-1400Z - - 263 201 - 464 6322
D1-1500Z - - 225 260 - 485 6807
D1-1600Z ---+- ---+- 255 215 ---+- 470 7277
D1-1700Z - - 222 193 - 415 7692
D1-1800Z - - 249 174 - 423 8115
D1-1900Z - - 222 218 - 440 8555
D1-2000Z - - 216 182 - 398 8953
D1-2100Z - 204 219 36 - 459 9412
D1-2200Z - 310 212 - - 522 9934
D1-2300Z - 314 176 - - 490 10424
D2-0000Z ---+- 228 156 ---+- ---+- 384 10808
D2-0100Z 110 186 30 - - 326 11134
D2-0200Z 130 312 - - - 442 11576
D2-0300Z 144 370 - - - 514 12090
D2-0400Z 216 330 - - - 546 12636
D2-0500Z 154 244 - - - 398 13034
D2-0600Z 156 120 - - - 276 13310 15
D2-0700Z - - - - - 0 13310 60
D2-0800Z ---+- ---+- ---+- ---+- ---+- 0 13310 60
D2-0900Z - - - - - 0 13310 60
D2-1000Z - - - - - 0 13310 60
D2-1100Z - - - - - 0 13310 60
D2-1200Z - - - - - 0 13310 60
D2-1300Z - - - - - 0 13310 60
D2-1400Z - - 3 30 - 33 13343 52
D2-1500Z - - 193 56 - 249 13592
D2-1600Z ---+- ---+- 203 28 ---+- 231 13823
D2-1700Z - - 221 118 - 339 14162
D2-1800Z - - 140 88 - 228 14390
Total: 2940 6446 3205 1799 0
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