[3830] IARU K9YC(@KI6NUL) M/S HP

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                    IARU HF World Championship

Call: K9YC
Operator(s): K9YC
Station: KI6NUL

Class: M/S HP
QTH: SCV
Operating Time (hrs): 21

Summary:
 Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs  Zones  HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
  160:                           
   80:   42             7       3
   40:  405            28      11
   20:  402      5     38      37
   15:   64     12     16      11
   10:                           
-------------------------------------
Total:  930     17     89      62  Total Score = 497,394

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Comments:

I invited Byron, KI6NUL, to come up and hang out during contests, and he 
took me up on it for this one. He's one of the new crop of sharp young guys,
many of them from the computer world, who have joined NCCC and gotten serious
at learning CW. I expected him to operate a lot more than he did, so I set up
as Multi/One, which disallows SO2R but allows use of the cluster. As it turns
out, Byron wasn't feeling well and left early, so mostly watched and listened
as I worked CW. He made only three QSOs while I took a dinner break, so this is
essentially a single-op with use of the cluster. It's also nearly all CW -- the
times I ventured to SSB produced few QSOs, so after he left, I stuck to CW.:)

I can't believe the hours I put in on this contest -- N1MM says 21.25 
hours. I was up at 3am Saturday to take my XYL to the airport -- she's 
at an artists workshop in NC for two weeks -- and got back home in time 
to start on 40M at 1300Z. Except for a couple of coffee breaks and that 
dinner break, I was on solid until 1106Z (4am local).

I was surprised to be able to work all of the WRTC competitor stations 
on 20 CW. They weren't loud, but most were solid copy, and most 
heard me on the second or third call unless there was a big pileup. 
Never heard them on the other bands.

Ran into a strange bug with N1MM -- something was populating the Zone 
entry, about 10% of the time it would be wrong, I would enter what I 
heard, and N1MM would save the original wrong entry. In some cases, N1MM 
would save the ARRL section in place of the zone after I had made the 
zone entry manually. This happened MANY times. Byron is an N1MM user, 
and was watching this happen, so I've got a witness. :) 

N1MM didn't catch the wrong exchange, because virtually any text string 
is legal for the HQ stations and the IARU officials, so it gave me 
credit for new multipliers each time it made that error. Luckily I caught the
problem one of the first few times it happened, and fixed it with Quick Edit,
so I think I have a good log. 

Conditions were bad on 40 and awful on 80 -- lots of QRN (especially to 
the east) and lousy propagation. As a result, there was VERY little 
activity on 80M, and I worked only a half dozen of the western-most big 
stations on EU on 40M. On the positive side, 15M did open to EU for a 
few hours -- not strong, but enough to work several big stations -- and 
there was some activity from the Pacific. There was much less activity 
from South America than in other contests. Again, only a dozen or so big 
stations and another dozen small ones. I was able to S&P effectively on 20M,
but was never able to get a run going. I did get some great runs on 40M.

All in all, a good time, and I was surprised that I could still 
function (sort of) after being awake for 25 hours!

73, Jim K9YC


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