[3830] RTTY Roundup W6YX M/S HP

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                    ARRL RTTY Roundup

Call: W6YX
Operator(s): K6ENT, N6DE, W6LD, W6RQ, W6CT
Station: W6YX

Class: M/S HP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
   80:  140
   40:  217
   20:  366
   15:  380
   10:  271
------------
Total: 1374  State/Prov = 58  Countries = 51  Total Score = 149,766

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Comments:

This was a lot of fun!  For the prior three years, the W6YX operation was a M/S
LP effort between Kent K6ENT and I.  This year, we decided to enter the HP
category to achieve a higher score, and enjoyed the added company of W6RQ, W6LD,
and W6CT in the team.  They are active CW/SSB contesters, seemed to have a great
time in their first RTTY contest, learned a lot about Writelog and RTTY signals,
and did a fine job of CQing or S&Ping (or both).  It was also good to see WA1QQK
who visited for a minute.

We had 250 more QSOs and 7 more multipliers this year running HP compared to LP
last year.  We worked hard at getting every multiplier we could.  The problem
from W6 in this contest is accumulating European mults.  We yielded 19 EU mults
out of 51 EU QSOs: 48 on 20m, 2 on 15m, 1 on 40m.  15m to EU was a major
disappointment from W6.  Kent discovered that the path was skewed, with 9A5W
significantly stronger on a tribander pointed to South America compared with a
monobander pointed directly toward EU.  We had roughly a 2 hour opening on 20m
to EU.  I was surprised that almost no EU stations were CQing on 20m.  We called
CQ and had several EU stations trickle in, some with 599 signals.  There just
weren't a large number of them.  Were all the European stations on 15m working
the east coast?  Many thanks to all the Europeans who answered our CQ on 20m.

Activity from the U.S. was amazing!  When spotting on Sunday, there were dozens
of stateside stations that we still hadn't worked.  I was pleasantly surprised
by the increased Japanese activity on RTTY.  We made 145 JA QSOs.  Thanks to
them for their participation.

1500 QSOs was definitely attainable if everything went right.  We made a couple
of tactical errors, ending up stuck on an inactive band because we were a M/S
and ran out of band changes for that hour. (Some day, I hope the ARRL removes
the 6-band change limit per hour for M/S stations in the RTTY Roundup.)  We also
should have stopped at midnight, as there were many more QSOs to be made at 6am
on Sunday.  Lastly, we need to work on maintaining a consistent level of mental
focus, intensity, and determination for all 24 hours.

We heard a lot of tremendous signal strengths.  I copied a couple on a piece of
paper when I happened to be thinking about it:

10m - 599+40dB: N5JR, N5ZM
15m - 599+40dB: AI9T, W0ML

We interfaced Writelog to the packet system this year and submitted lots of
spots.  Hopefully this helped some of the stations using packet.

Kudos to the ARRL for adding the affiliated club competition to the RTTY Roundup
this year!  Several NCCC members tried RTTY for the first time just to
contribute to the club score.  I'm sure the case was the same for many other
clubs.

Thanks for all the QSOs!

73...
-Dean - N6DE


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