[3830] ARRLDX CW W2BC(W2RU) SOAB HP

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                    ARRL DX Contest, CW

Call: W2BC
Operator(s): W2RU
Station: W2RU

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: WNY
Operating Time (hrs): 34

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:   82    45
   80:  390    54
   40:  841    84
   20: 1120    83
   15:  942    81
   10:   21    13
-------------------
Total: 3396   360  Total Score = 3,666,600

Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club

Comments:

A painful week-old pinched nerve kept me guessing about my ability to put in
substantial "chair time" until Friday morning, when I decided to see how things
went.  Thanks to a bad case of RF ingress,  I had to swap out my latest software
and computer on Friday for my older PC with CT-Win on it.  

About 3 hours before the contest I discovered the 20- and 40-meter beams were
about 100 degrees away from where the rotor control said they were.  Tests
showed slippage somewhere up topside, but by 1 hour before the contest I had
managed to jockey them into the northeast, where I could only hope any weekend
gusts wouldn't materially change their heading, aimed at Europe. 

No sooner had I started the contest when I discovered the main tuning knob on
my transceiver wasn't working properly.  Increasingly as the contest
progressed, slowly turning the knob would not change my frequency; only rapid
spins would allow me to QSY!  This made S&P a little dicey, but if there was
ever a contest to focus on Running, this was it! 

Actually, between the beams "fixed" at 45 degrees and the main tuning knob, my
strategy boiled down to a simple three-step process:

  1.  Find the highest band where it looked like I could keep a reasonable Run
rate going; and
  2.  Find a semi-clear frequency for Running.
  3.  When I couldn't Run any more, go looking for multipliers on the (open)
band with the lowest total relative to what I thought I should have on that
band at that particular time in the contest period.  Even so, my 20-meter
multipliers were well behind both 40 and 15 until late Sunday, when a concerted
effort to chase down all the CA/SA/Pacific DXpeditions paid off.

Some personal milestones from this contest:

*  Never worked a JA opening on 20 with the beam aimed at Europe before!
*  Never worked so many JAs on 40 at one sitting before -- and certainly not
with the beam aimed at Europe!
*  Beat my previous "personal best" for this event by about 3 dB!

Many times I noticed the 10-minute Rate meter in CT over 200.  My best
"calendar" hour was 1300-1400Z Saturday morning, with 184 QSOs on 20. 
Runner-up hours were 1200-1400Z Sunday morning on 15, with 168 and 161. 
Sometimes I had five QSOs logged in a single clock minute but the drone of the
very deep pile-ups actually slowed things down during what might have been even
bigger hours.

Slept both nights, so never did collect many low-band Pacific multipliers.

I had planned on climbing the tower Saturday afternoon, when things
traditionally get very slow here, to see if I could fix the slippage problem. 
But things never did get slow, and I never did climb the tower until Monday,
although the beams were still in the northeast, where I had left them.

Antennas:
  160:  90-foot top-loaded, shunt-fed Rohn 45 tower
   80:  Dipole @ 70 feet
   40:  M2 40M2LL @ 98 feet fixed on Europe
   20:  CC 20-4CD @ 92 feet fixed on Europe + CC A-4 @ 30 feet
   15:  CC 15-4CD @ 60 feet + same CC A-4
   10:  Same CC A-4
   Low-band RX:  300-ft Beverage for Europe  

Bud, W2RU (operator, W2BC)


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