[3830] MSQP NO5W Mobile LP

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                    Mississippi QSO Party

Call: NO5W
Operator(s): NO5W
Station: NO5W

Class: Mobile LP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): 8.5

Summary:
 Band  CW-Dig Qs  Ph Qs
------------------------
   80:               
   40:               
   20:    481       0
   15:     53       0
   10:               
    6:               
    2:               
------------------------
Total:    534       0  Mults = 38  Total Score = 20,292

Club: NARS - Northwest Houston ARS

Comments:

Equipment: 

20M/15M hamsticks on trimag mounts on roof of Pathfinder
ICOM IC-706MKIIG running about 100W
Homebrew logging program "CQ/X de NO5W"
Garmin Street Pilot III GPS
Keyspan USBx4RS232 hub
Dell D400 Laptop running WinXP
WinKey Serial External Keyer by K1EL
Palm Paddle
16 Key X-Key by PI Engineering

Comments:

If two years can make a tradition its become a MS QSO Party tradition for my YL
driver and I to drive over from Houston to southeast Louisiana on Friday to
visit my mom and then up early on Saturday to drive to the starting point about
an hour north in Pike county MS taking her along to eyeball QSO with her elderly
sister-in-law while we are out partying on a big loop through counties in
southern MS looping back to pick her up and head back to LA around dark. This
year was no different in that regard but it was different in terms of results as
we exceeded last year's total QSOs by more than 25% and put on 21 counties
compared to 18 in the previous year covering approximately 450 miles in the
process. Some reasons for improved results are ... 

Activity - I dont know how much activity there was on the MS side but it seemed
pretty good on the non-MS side as we had a good group of trackers through most
of the day. Special thanks go to the following stations who stayed with us and
managed to get in the log in more than half of the counties: K8MFO(21),
K4MUT(20), W2LHL(18), WB2LOS(18), W9AEM(18), KO1U(17), K5KS(16), W1END(16),
W8WVU(16), KA9JAC(15), K3GBB(13), W9MSE(13), DL9AWI(12), and DL3GA(11). I was
using a GPS and had programmed the logging program to estimate the time to the
next county based on current position and closing speed toward the crossing
point so when things got a little slow as the pileup was worked down I could
press a button and announce the next county and the number of minutes to the
crossing. Usually when I did that I got back a few RR indicating that some were
tracking right along. And when the next county arrived the herd was usually back
for another round.

Conditions - As usual, 20 meters was the money band and conditions on 20M seemed
to be better than they were in the LA QP a few weeks before. I tried to honor
all requests to QSY to 15 usually working that station and then sending out a
few CQs until it was obvious that no other callers were listening. Best time on
15 was around 1520 UTC when we managed to work 9 European stations (mostly DLs)
within a short period. So 15M was open but not many state-side stations seemed
to be listening there. 

Counties covered - Best rate of the day and biggest pileups occurred in Jasper
which seemed to be optimum length between county lines of about 15 minutes and
where the rate was running at about 150/hour all the way from the start of the
county to within about 100 yards before the Jones county line where I had to
make the driver stop on the side of I59 while I ran over the hill and into the
woods for a quick break! I guess I momentarily forgot that I was filling more
than the log!

Driver - I had originally thought that we would finish up at dark after 16
counties in Pearl River but, as usual, the driver's foot was a lot heavier than
the one I modeled in Streets and Trips so when we finished up Pearl it was still
only 2100 UTC so we continued on and arrived back in Pike around 2230 with the
driver still going strong so we headed on west for three additional counties and
then called it a day when the driver said in no uncertain terms "Read my lips,
its QRT"!

So that's what we did with 534 Qs in the log and hopefully some new counties in
the logs of the deserving.

73/Chuck/NO5W


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