Hi all,
Oh boy! Went out for a bite to eat with the XYL at lunchtime, and very
quickly ended up with something nasty. Spent the afternoon being very sick,
which wasn't great before a contest! Just as well I had set everything up on
Friday.
Managed to be in the shack well before 1700UTC, coffee in hand, and had a
look round the bands before the start.
Went to make my first contact, and found that WL would only send one tone.
Hmmm.
I closed WL, opened the MMTTY folder that it uses, and tried MMTTY from
there. No joy, no keying, nothing.
I then spent the next hour trying to find out what had happened, as it all
worked nicely on Friday when I set up WL for this contest.
In the end, it transpired that MMTTY had lost the port settings. I cannot
understand why, or how, as I had changed nothing.
The MMTTY I use for WL is for that use alone, so I cannot see why it should
have lost the port.
Oh well, such things are meant to make us think!
Anyway, this was the first time I had used 75Baud RTTY in a contest. I have
used it before, but only in general use, and not often.
I guess conditions didn't help, with the A index being at 21 at the start of
the contest. Tuning seemed to be very crucial, meaning you had to be spot on
on the CQ'ing stations frequency, or they could not decode signals.
I did try calling CQ several times, and found folk were calling way off my
frequency.
By the time I had used the RIT, the TX had stopped. Hence the reasons for so
many AGN AGN??
Also, I found a load of folk still sending 599, and I also noticed a few
45Baud signals in there too, and yes, one was calling CQ BARTG TEST.
I'm not sure whether I need to recalibrate the Microham soundcard, as I
found it best to tune the signal in slightly off, when I then got clear
print. By that I mean that the twin peaks were not quite lined up with the
two vertical lines in the MMTTY window. I had calibrated it when I changed
the old 756Pro for the IC7800, and it was only off by a couple of Hz, and
not enough to make a difference.
Maybe it is just a factor of 75Baud RTTY? Anyone got any ideas?
Anyway, had to finish early, mostly due to not feeling great, but I did
manage 5 continents, missing out on OC.
Here is what I ended up with:
Operating Time (hrs): 2
Rig: IC7800 at about 90Watts
WL and MMTTY
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
80: 0
40: 8
20: 47
15: 5
10: 0
------------
Total: 60 Mults = 42 Continents = 5 Total Score = 12,600
Thanks to all for the fun, and see you all in the next one.....
73 de Phil GU0SUP
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