[3830] OkQP NO5W Rover LP

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                    Oklahoma QSO Party

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

Class: Rover LP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): 18

Summary:
 Band  CW-Dig Qs  Ph Qs
------------------------
  160:      0       0
   80:      0       0
   40:    474       0
   20:    417       0
   15:      5       0
   10:      0       0
    6:      0       0
------------------------
Total:    896       0  Mults = 48  Total Score = 129,024

Club: Northwest Amateur Radio Society - Houston

Comments:

Equipment: IC-706MKIIG, HiQ 4/80 antenna with Turbo Tuner, Dell Latitude D400
running CQ/X de NO5W ver 1.4, 2002 Pathfinder

The Party: Several of the reports from outside Oklahoma have noted that this was
a fantastic party. Let me add that it was even more fun as a mobile on the
inside even though in my case it required about 1400 miles of driving, only
about 800 of which was during the party. So what was the motivation for such an
expenditure of time and other resources? Well for starters I find mobile
operation in a QSO party to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the hobby.
There's just nothing quite like traveling around the countryside and handling a
roaring pileup every half hour or so. And there's also the fact that my last
three opportunities to party on the QSO circuit have been frustrated by either
weather or equipment problems so I was looking for an opportunity to party --
and I found it with participation far exceeding my expectations.

The Trip: We drove up from Houston to Durant on Friday in order to start out in
Bryan county first thing Saturday morning. From there we covered the following
counties on Saturday: Bryan, Choctaw, Pushmataha, Atoka, Pittsburg, Haskell,
McIntosh, Muskogee, Sequoyah, Wagoner, Cherokee, Adair, Delaware, Ottawa, Craig,
Nowata, Washington. After spending Saturday night in Bartlesville we covered:
Washington, Tulsa, Osage, Pawnee, Creek, Payne, Lincoln, Logan, Oklahoma,
Cleveland, McClain, Garvin, Murray, Carter, and Love. For the most part the trip
was uneventful due to the excellent driving of my wife, Keri, but we did get
into a very bad thunderstorm in Adair which, with visions of lightning coming
down the HiQ and into the headphones, forced us to QRT for about an hour to wait
out the storm. But one thing I noticed was that its mighty dry up in Oklahoma so
I'm sure the locals had a different feeling about the storm. I hope the
situation around Osage on Sunday wasn't too confusing to all the callers. If
you're wondering why we kept looping on Tulsa-Osage-Pawnee in fairly rapid
succession it's because along the route we took there was only about a mile of
Osage and it was all over a bridge with no place to stop so we made several
loops across the bridge and back to give Osage at least a few minutes of air
time with Tulsa and Pawnee at each end of the bridge. Finally the driver asked
"how many times are we going to do this"? so we broke out of the loop and headed
on into Pawnee. Another thing that I recall about the trip was the comments I
got back from the driver when I asked if we ould "make" that last county before
the closing bell -- I'll let you use your imagination on that one!

Results: As you can see from the above band tallies 40M contributed over 50% of
the Qs so I was very glad that I had been able to get the new HiQ 4/80 antenna
working and tuning with the Turbo Tuner. And it seemed to be putting out a good
signal as I was feeling loud and getting some good rate. My only concern is that
it seemed to take forever to tune from 40 to 20. So my basic strategy was to
start a county on whatever band I had finished the last one on and then about
half way through or when the rate got below about 60/hour switch over to the
other band. Biggest thrill was seeing the ten minute rate meter hit 168/hour
several times, in particular back to back in Payne and Logan counties.

Many thanks to all the stations that followed us and helped create those pileups
including the following who worked us in more than 50% of the counties: AA4FU,
AA9KH, DL5AWI, K4AMC, K4MUT, K8MFO, KS5A, N2CU, N6MU, ND5S/8, NU0Q, W4IX, W5ESE,
W6RLL, and WA7JHQ. After it was over and we stopped for lunch at a Chili's just
north of Dallas I could swear that I was able to copy several of your calls from
the sounds of the dot matrix printer used to prepare the bill!

Finally thanks to the OKDXA for sponsoring this party -- I hope to be back again
next year.

73/Chuck/NO5W


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