AE0M SprINT Score and Story

[Tony and Celia Becker]

                  INTERNET SPRINT CONTEST -- August 1996
Band     QSOs     Antennas
40m       29      Inv. Vee @ 25'
20m       60      Inv. Vee @ 24'
Total     89      (Last QSO # was 91, this is less two dupes) 

Power: 150 W
RIG: FT-990, FL7000 & 486DX2-66 MHz running N6TRLog ver. 5.51

Story:  Twelve Qs worse than last time, probably due to overreacting.

Celia supervised the planting of a 20' REDWOOD tree in the garden this week (let the HOA just try to stop THAT tower from growing) so we spent the day in the 95 degree heat trying to make the rest of the garden a little less tacky looking.

At 4 PM, power fails.  After waiting patiently for 45 minutes, we make some calls and find it is another rolling mega-outage plagueing the entire Left Coast grid.  Thinking quickly, I jump in the car to get gas for the Field Day generator.  

The garage door won't open.  No problem, just yank the door release and ... OOF, too much gardening makes those out of shape muscles sore!  The first station is out of power; right, those pumps are electric!  I run two miles to the next nearest source of petrol, and Gawd, there are 30 cars queued up!  I Get 5 gallons of Califonia low emission regular and wish it was real gas.  20 minutes to go, and as I pull in the drive, I see the power has come back on!  Oh well, I'll need the gas for the CQP this Fall anyway.  

I stick my head in the shower to cool off,  throw the towel on the floor and sit down at the rig.  5 minutes to go and the computer has re-booted to DOS, so I just run my batch file to start TRLog and quickly check around 20m.  W6RGG is making QSOs, then stops.  As my watch ticks over to 0100Z I fire off a CQ and Bob answers me.  This calms me down and I start off at a good rate.  (good thing Bob never uses those tricky names).  

At 01:42 the computer dumps me out to DOS in the middle of a QSO!  I haltingly complete the exchange, and try to figure out why.  K2MM reminds me "your freq., Tony" I respond "my computer just crashed!" and then I realize what has happened.  Unless I type a key at boot time, my default config.sys installs a driver which TRLog can't handle when making a backup to a floppy drive.  The power came back on and re-booted the beast while I was out chasing gas!

The whole thing cost me just 5 minutes but my concentration was broken.  Still, I did need the exercise, 89 Qs is my second best in this contest and I had a good laugh.

AE0M, Tony Becker - becker at shell.portal.com - Silicon Valley, U.S.A.