[3830] ARRL SS SSB NK7U Multi-Op

[k7zo at cableone.net]

                     ARRL Sweepstakes, SSB
                    
Call: NK7U
Operator(s): NK7U, K7ZO
Station: NK7U

Class: Multi-Op
QTH: Oregon
Operating Time (hrs): 20
 

Summary:
 Band     QSOs
-------------------------------
  160:      0
   80:    101
   40:    111
   20:    305
   15:    163
   10:    959
-------------------------------
Total:   1639 x     80  =  262,240

Club: Snake River Contest Club

Comments:

Joe/NK7U and I decided to have some fun and run a multi-op for phone 
sweepstakes from his QTH in Oregon, in celebration of his moving back to Baker 
City from California where he lived the last three years. His station is really 
built for M/S DX contests with many high antennas and stacks thereof. For SS we 
ended up using a single low antenna out of his rotating two stacks. For example 
a 10M antenna at about 25' was usually 2-3 S units better than its upper pair 
at 55'. We did have a problem with the lower 40M beam so we had to use the 
upper one at 180' that probably cost us something. 

Didn't quite make it a maximum effort as I had to drive 2 hours back to Boise 
and I didn't want to get home at 11PM needing to get up for work the next 
morning. Operated about 20 hours and so could easily have added 150-200 more 
QSO's to the log, pushing our score up to the 290,000 range or so. 

Our rates on Sunday, though certainly lower than Saturday, were remarkably 
steady. See the rate sheet below, but we had consecutive hours of 69, 78, 58, 
75, 78, 77, 78, and Sunday.

Looking at a few posts it is interesting to see how different this contest is 
run as you travel east to west across the country. On the east coast and upper 
mid-west 40 and 80 are the main bands. In the south it is more of a 20M 
contest. And, as you get out our way 10M is the band. We were on 10M about the 
whole day on Sunday except for a short trip to 15M. (Where s3-s4 power line 
noise made things really tough and probably cost us 30-40Q's on Saturday while 
we were there.) The reasons for the 10M focus for the west are probably two 
fold. Being farther west, when 10M is open, it is open for longer since we have 
more daylight on Saturday than the east coast gang. Also, the population 
density is much lower out here meaning the low bands won't snag as many QSO's 
close in as they do in the east. And trying to capture the 100W and a dipole 
gang in coast to coast QSO's is really tough. This is why SS in low sunspot 
years is much tougher on the west coast than on the east. 

For being a Multi we started sweating the sweep. Coming into Sunday morning we 
still needed QC/PQ and the infamous YT. Joe found a VE2 and worked him and then 
of course we worked another 3 or 4 in the next hour. That left VT. Joe also 
found the really ugly VY1VY pileup on 21200 and got through fairly quickly. 
This was in the 1800Z hour on Sunday so it took us about 15 hours of operating 
to get the sweep.

We used WriteLog as we have been for the last couple of years at NK7U because 
of its great networking support and other cool features. However, we really got 
finger tied with the way it handles serial numbers across multiple PC's. (Like 
many multi-ops we ran two hardware interlocked stations that kept us from 
transmitting at the same time.) The problem we ran into is that WL would "lock" 
a serial number when one PC would start entering QSO data. So if the S&P 
station would pre-fill the data entry line with the call, check, etc. it would 
lock in the serial number from the run station. This caused confusion to the 
run station who started wondering what happened to the next serial number, etc. 
We learned to just not type anything in on the S&P station until you were 
actually in the QSO process. If anyone has any thoughts or observations on this 
please let me know. I know it is hard problem to solve but it seems like we are 
not quite there yet.

Scott/K7ZO


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