[3830] ARRLDX CW WC1M SOAB HP

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                    ARRL DX Contest, CW

Call: WC1M
Operator(s): WC1M
Station: WC1M

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: NH
Operating Time (hrs): 41
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:   30    27
   80:  253    58
   40:  705    84
   20:  833    91
   15:  645    80
   10:  471    71
-------------------
Total: 2937   411  Total Score = 3,621,321

Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club

Comments:

Antennas:

160M  -  trapped vee @65'
 80M  -  delta loop @75', trapped vee @65'
 40M  -  40-2CD @75', 4-square
 20M  -  4-el @72'
 15M  -  5-el @50'
 10M  -  6-el @50'
 
 580' NE beverage

 All yagis on separate tubular towers

Equipment:

FT-1000D + Alpha 87A, FT-1000MP + Acom 2000A, Writelog, TopTen band decoders 
and switches.

Not my best effort -- I did almost 3,600 Qs two years ago with about the same
mults. The mults this time are low by about 50. Most of that was due to not
using the second radio enough (sleep deprivation) and poor production on 10m.
Probably my 50-footer isn't helping, but I'm also wondering if the beam was
turned the wrong way Sunday morning (see rotor problems, below.) Not all that
great on 15m, which also has a 50-foot tower, the same possible rotor problem,
and a 450-foot coax run (not hardline.) The big 4-el on 20m at 72' seems to be
doing a good enough job. My 40m numbers are respectable, so I think the 40-2CD
at 75' has gotten me into contention on that band. The 4-square was less useful
for S&P in this contest, probably due to fewer Caribbean stations. The beverage
was essential for 40m on Friday night, when the band was noisy and very crowded.
I'm reasonably happy with the 160m and 80m numbers, given my modest setup. The
beverage was absolutely key to all three low bands.

The good news is that the XYL actually agreed to two 100-foot towers about a
week ago. She was begging for three pieces of furniture that I wasn't sure I
would like. In a fit of desperation she agreed to trade them for the towers. My
six year old has been lobbying for towers on my behalf for months now, and I
took advantage of a weak moment. I don't think my XYL quite understood what she
was doing, but I think my chances are better than ever for at least one
100-footer and maybe two. I'd like to see what I can do with a couple of real
towers. Oh, and as it turned out, I liked the furniture :-)

I had a good first hour for a change. My early numbers have been pretty bad in
the last few contests. Looking at rate sheets for top operators, big numbers are
important in the early hours. They help get the motivation going, too. If I have
500 QSOs in the first 5-6 hours, or reach 1000 QSOs before 1200z, then I know
I'm doing well and have a chance to place in the top ten or fifteen. Also, it's
difficult or impossible to catch up later if you don't start well. Anyway, 116
Qs in the first hour felt good and vindicated the decision to add the 40-2CD to
the station. The rest of the hours on Friday night were not as good, but they
were better than the dreadful first nights in the last couple of contests I've
done from home. No 20m EU sunrise opening (is it gone until the next sunspot
peak?), but 80m and 40m made up for it. The big surprise was 20m opening like
gangbusters at 1050z. I happened to be working the band just as it opened, and
it was like someone flipped a switch. The signals started booming in, the
10-minute rate meter jumped to 180-200, and I knocked off 215 contacts in about
80 minutes. Writelog shows 157 Qs during the 1100z hour, and QRATE shows a peak
of 161 per hour. That's the highest I've ever done on 20m, and is close to my
best 10m number. 

The big runs on 20m and nice rate on 40m and 80m were among the highlights in
this contest. I really love it when the signals are strong, the band is quiet,
the ops are fast, exotic calls are coming in, the rate is high, and my CW copy
is humming. There's really nothing quite like it, although busting a pileup on a
rare station on the first call comes close. Another highlight was several
successful mult moves. I'm still letting too many get away, but this time I
tried harder to remember to move mults. It worked more than in the past, and I
was thrilled each time. All but one op was willing to move, and they all tried
their best to find me and complete the QSO. My thanks to all of you. It was
really fun. It was also cool to be moved by OH2BH from 80m to 160m. It was also
neat to be called by A51B (one of the rarest just a few years ago) and S21YY
(been chasing that one on CW for many years.)

Like others, I had a really hard time with sleep deprivation. I wasn't
well-prepared, having spent most of the week rushing to get a bunch of work and
personal to-dos done before the contest. I was still running around on Friday.
For the first time in a while I didn't study past contests or work out a band
plan -- I just used old rate sheets for my station and some of the past winners.
I certainly didn't get enough sleep in advance. I had hoped to sleep several
hour Friday afternoon, but only managed 45 minutes or so. To make matters worse,
I was sick with the flu for about 10 days this month and hadn't quite shaken it.
I was still below-par physically by the time the contest rolled around, but at
least this time I didn't barf my guts out and quit early like last year! I was
tired at the start, and it just got worse. That's pretty normal for me, but
usually I pick up steam the second day and feel much better. The first 12 hours
are always tough, the second 12 hours are horrible, the third 12 hours feel a
little better, then the adrenalin kicks in and I feel a lot better for the final
12 hours. This time, the recovery didn't start until about 6 hours before the
end of the contest. I was so tired that I literally fell asleep during QSOs! I
would awaken with a start and realize that I had either missed the report or
owed the guy a TU. I'm pretty sure I was unconscious for only a second or two,
because I don't think anyone sent "?" or went away -- the QSO just ended
normally. It was kinda scary, though. I just faded out. My CW sending and
receiving got pretty rough during the slow hours, and second radio production
was weak throughout the contest except for a handful of hours in which I made a
real effort to pound both radios.

So far, I haven't experience any hallucinations, delusions, visions or the like.
I haven't yet forgotten what I'm doing or how to operate, although my operating
has gotten quite bad at times and I've struggled to pick the right key to push.
Perhaps I have retained some ability to distinguish fantasy from reality under
extremely stressful conditions from certain activities in my college days that I
can't go into here. Or, perhaps years of contesting have a degenerative effect
on the brain and I can look forward to joining the more experienced ops in la-la
land.

I experimented with several 10-minute super-naps and that seemed to work pretty
well. I read or heard a report about research showing that that the old
20-minute power nap and 45-minute multiples might not be as effective as once
thought. The researcher suggested that as little as 10 minutes can provide
significant recovery without the struggle to wake up. Sure enough, I was
surprised by how easy it was to wake up and how much recovery I got out of such
a short nap. To avoid a bad mistake, I snoozed in the operating chair with a
loud alarm just out of reach. I took 3-4 10 minute naps and one 45-minute nap
that way. If that had been it, I would have operated 45 hours or more. But...

The big loss was three+ hours I had to spend on a nasty technical problem
Saturday afternoon. At about 2115z, the DCU-1 digital rotor controller went
bonkers whenever I switched to the 10m and 15m beams and refused to turn them.
That resulted in a lengthy below-zero trek through three feet of snow down a
steep hill to the main tower farm. You can imagine how I felt about doing this
when my body and mind were racked with sickness, fatigue and lack of sleep. At
least it wasn't dark. I don't know how the brave ones among us climb towers in
the dead of a winter night to fix problems during a contest. To make matters
worse, I'm pretty sure now that the problem was up in the shack and that the
trip and three-hour loss may have been unnecessary. Anyway, I lost the period
from 2115z Saturday to 0130z Sunday, which probably cost about 250 QSOs and a
bunch of mults.

Here are the technical details (you can skip the next four paragraphs if it gets
too boring): By the time I installed the rotors for 10m and 15m last year, I had
already used up all five control cables in the conduit between the shack and
main tower farm for the motorized crankup tower, 20m rotor, 4-square control
box/dumped power meter, and two SO2R switch arrays. So, I built a relay box to
remotely switch the single rotor cable and DCU-1 digital controller between the
20m, 15m and 10m rotors. There are two sets of four DPDT relays in a cascaded
configuration. In the default unpowered position, the first set of four relays
passes the eight cable wires to the 20m rotor. When 12VDC is applied to those
relays, they pass the signals to the second set of relays. When the second set
of relays is unpowered, it sends the signals to the 15m rotor, and when the
second set of relays gets 12VDC, it switches the signals to the 10m relay. This
way, I could do all the switching with just two 12VDC control wires, which
happens to be all the spare wires that were left in the five control cable runs
(luckily, they were in the rotor cable, left over when I moved the motor
capacitor to the utility box by the tower.) I built a little control box in the
shack that has a rotary switch and some LEDs to tell me which antenna is
selected. This setup worked well in WPX, IARU and CQWW, although in CQWW I
forgot to set the switch several times and ended up turning the wrong antenna.
One of those mistakes cost me a good part of a morning 10m run, so I resolved to
be much more aware of the switch setting in ARRL DX.

The first hint of trouble was that all three rotors had trouble starting in the
very cold weather. This is a well-known problem with certain Hy-Gain rotors,
usually corrected by rocking the rotor back and forth with the controller
switches. For several years I had a saga with my first T2X seizing whenever the
temp got below 32F, but that completely disappeared when Hy-Gain replaced the
rotor. The other two rotors are Ham IVs, which can also stick in cold weather.
When the contest started, I had to give all three rotors several "nudges" to get
them going (the DCU-1 actually rocks them back and forth by default -- Hy-Gain's
attempt to fix the cold weather problem.) The T2X had the least difficulty, but
the two Ham IVs got sluggish after being idle for a few hours. When the DCU-1
went nuts, I thought maybe the two Ham IV rotors had either seized completely or
had gotten torn up by too much forcing against whatever makes them stick
(W1ECT's T2X got destroyed that way.) But I also had a problem with the second
radio switching to the 160/80 beam and the 4-square on Friday night, when the
temperature got down to 20 below zero, so I thought another possibility was that
some of the many relays down in the utility box may have been affected by the
extreme cold.

Saturday afternoon, when it was about 5 below zero, I took a heat gun down the
steep hill (snow shoes required) and warmed everything up. That seemed to fix
the antenna switching problem and the 10m rotor, but not the 15m rotor. In fact,
when I tried to turn the 15m beam, the 10m beam turned! Hmmm. When I got back to
the shack I broke out the multimeter and checked voltage on the little rotor
switching box. Sure enough, it was sending 12VDC out both lines when set to
either 10m or 15m -- in other words, it was selecting the 10m relays when set to
10m or 15m. It should have been sending 12VDC down only one line when set to
15m. I opened the box and discovered that a diode was shorted. The diode is
connected across the two control lines so that when the first is energized the
second is not, and when the second line is energized the first line is energized
as well. That's how it does the switching logic. I replaced the diode and was
able to turn both rotors! Back in business. However, near the end of the contest
the rotors got finicky again and I couldn't tell if the diode was blown again or
the rotors were just cold. After the contest I opened the box and found that the
diode was indeed shorted again. This time I replaced the relatively small 1N914
signal diode with a much heavier 1N4003 power switching diode. You might be
thinking that I should have checked the voltage *before* trekking down the hill
on Saturday, and you're right. But I just didn't think that anything could be
wrong in that simple little switch box -- it only has a switch and three LEDs (I
had forgotten about the diode.)

I'm still not sure what happened. When I was moving some boxes around just
before the contest, I noticed that the 40m Alliance HD-73 rotor controller light
flashed a couple of times, as if it had a loose connection or a short. When I
opened the small rotor switching box on Saturday afternoon, I saw that if the
box is squeezed the case shorts to the 12VDC supply. That shouldn't have
affected the Alliance control box, but maybe there was a 12VDC path through the
external preset box I built for the Alliance controller. So perhaps the cause of
my problems was just a short across the diode. After replacing the diode
Saturday afternoon, I took steps to prevent the case from shorting, but in the
process shorted it several times before I figured out a fix, perhaps setting the
diode up for failure. There's another possibility: my 80m delta loop was running
somewhat higher SWR in this contest than usual (2:1 instead of 1.5:1). That's
probably the result of wind having moved the antenna around, or perhaps a lot of
snow on the ground under the bottom wire. Anyway, there must be a fair amount of
RF on the shield because every time I transmitted on 80m my satellite Internet
connection went nuts and all sorts of error messages flashed on the screen. I
ended up unplugging the satellite modem whenever I used 80m. I'm wondering if
the RF on the 80m coax had something to do with the diode failure. Hard to
believe the PIV would be high enough, though. I think it failed the first time
after I used 80m on Friday night, then failed the second time after I used 80m
early Sunday evening. Yet another possibility is that there's some sort of path
or interaction between the lines to which the diode is attached and the other
rotor control lines (such as current being induced in adjacent wires by the AC
sent to the brake solenoid or motor.) I have to believe the extreme cold has
something to do with it -- like I said, it all worked fine in the last three
contests. All this bears more investigation.

I should point out that the most reliable rotor was the old Alliance HD-73. It's
going on 20 years old and is turning a 40-2CD! Not a single problem all
weekend.

OK, a few operating beefs to go along with NT1N's:

My biggest beef is ops who do not zero beat with me. I'm all for offsetting the
frequency a bit to distinguish yourself in a pileup, but many times I find ops
calling who are completely out of the passband of my 500Hz filters! Sometimes I
figure out they are there when I hear some weak clicks slipping in under the
filter skirts. The RIT gets a real workout in these contests. Thanks goodness
Writelog now has a hotkey to reset the RIT to zero. Unfortunately, I can't use
the 250Hz filters as much as I would like because of the large number of ops who
don't know how to adjust the frequency of their radio. This is a basic ham radio
skill and should be of paramount importance to CW ops.

My second biggest beef is ops who repeat their call or exchange without my
asking -- especially the slow senders and those with unusually difficult fists
to copy. The unnecessary repeats really slow down the rate. I'm sure many QRP
ops think they need to repeat because I'm straining to hear them, but most would
be surprised at just how loud they can be. After all, there are probably very
good antennas at both ends. Anyway, don't repeat unless I ask, and if I ask for
a repeat, then send the info only once. I'll ask for it again if I need it. Of
course, I'm guilty of extra repeats sometimes, too, but I try not to do it.

My third biggest beef is ops who tune up right on top of me. This happened so
much on 40m the second day that I suspected someone was doing it on purpose.
They are so loud I know they can hear me asking them to stop. What gives?

My fourth biggest beef is ops who start calling CQ without sending "?" or
"QRL?". Yeah, I've done it a few times out of frustration, but normally I ask
before taking.

My fifth biggest beef is ops who take my frequency, or one very close to it, and
don't QSY when I ask. They are almost always 20 dB over S9 here, but refuse to
answer my pleas. That's just rude. Again, I'm probably guilty of doing this once
in a while, but I try to use better operating habits as a matter of course.

My sixth biggest beef is ops who do not stop calling in pileups long enough to
hear whether I'm working someone else or maybe calling them. These are usually
slow senders with bad fists. The best ops learn my rhythm and techniques, and
adjust their calling style to optimize their chances.

I have generally been against the use of cut numbers, but for the first time I
began to appreciate use of A for 1 and T for 0. They help keep the rate up.
However, I see no reason to use the other strange cut numbers and most of the
time they are confusing.

My last beef is about ops who complain about other ops too much in their
write-ups :-)

Even though I had thoughts of giving up serious single-op contesting at the peak
of my sleep deprivation, 24 hours later I couldn't wait to do the next one. Such
is the madness we all share. See you next time, whenever that is.

73, Dick WC1M


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