[3830] CQWW CW PJ4A M/2 HP

[webform at b41h.net]

                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW

Call: PJ4A
Operator(s): K4BAI, KU8E, K9YC, N3ZZ
Station: PJ4A

Class: M/2 HP
QTH: Bonnaire
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:
 Band  QSOs   Zones  Countries
-------------------------------
  160:   531    58       15
   80:  1069    98       27
   40:  2967   121       34
   20:  2646   116       35
   15:  2581   105       32
   10:  1224    88       27
-------------------------------
Total: 11018   586      170  Total Score = 24,675,840

Club: 

Comments:

Murphy made many visits, and certainly cost us points, but a great time 
was had by all. When planning our trip, we knew we had one good power amp on
site, an AL1200, and KU8E brought a second one back from being repaired at MFJ
after a failure when being used by another renter of the station. It seemed to

work, but putting it in place for "night before" activity showed that it 
had a bad antenna relay. Luckily there was a spare, and N3ZZ made a 
successful repair, but less than an hour into the contest we were getting
reports of a raspy note. Listening on another radio quickly revealed that 
there's almost certainly a bad cap in the HV string, so we shut it down.

As a backup, we had borrowed a 500W small solid state MFJ, and pressed 
it into service. It worked, but with no variable output network, it 
didn't like working into some fairly mismatched antennas, and we were 
lucky to get 300 watts on several bands. At least part of the time that's what
we were running on 160M. 

We used N1MM for logging, which means that we had to get a bit under the 
hood in several Windoze laptops, two of which were netbooks running 
Windoze 7.  All had the Windoze "feature" that gave the mouse a mind of 
its own -- if you passed over something that was clickable, the mouse 
decided you had clicked on it, and things began happening.  BAAAD 
things, like system files getting moved from one directory to another 
when I tried to get to the Hosts file to put in computer names and IP 
addresses. The worst part of this was that KU8E's computer became 
unusable 30 minutes before the contest started. The nuisance part of it 
was that you had to stop all of these Windoze clicks that happened every 
few minutes, so that it took about five times longer to do simple things 
than it should have.

Murphy also conspired to make our DSL quite flaky -- it drifted in and 
out of working for our entire visit.

On the air, nearly every run frequency became a pileup nearly 1kHz 
wide and many stations deep. This really slowed the rate.  The rigs were 
all FT1000MPs and Mark Vs, which made the pileups that much more 
difficult to work with, and reminded me of how much I appreciate my K3s. 
The audible difference is that with the MPs, the pileup is mush, while 
with the K3 you can much more readily pick out signals.

This was my first experience working with K4BAI, and I was amazed by his
operating skills. I thought I was doing pretty well, but every time I looked at
our rates he was beating me by 40-50 Qs per hour, and at least 40% of our Qs are
his. John and I started working each other in contests as early as 1957, a few
years after we were licensed, 400 miles apart. It was a great pleasure being
part of this great team. 

Many thanks to K2NG for the use of his great station, and to PJ4NX and PJ4LS
for their support. Also thanks to N0VD and W4OC for their help.

73, Jim K9YC


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