[3830] RTTY WPX KF3P(K3MM) SOAB HP

[webform at b41h.net]

                    CQ WW RTTY WPX Contest

Call: KF3P
Operator(s): K3MM
Station: N3HBX

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: MDC
Operating Time (hrs): 30
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
   80:  493
   40:  739
   20:  866
   15:  649
   10:    0
------------
Total: 2747  Prefixes = 845  Total Score = 7,526,415

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

My thanks to John, N3HBX for the use of his fine station.  All the hardware
worked great!

Boy it's been a while since I've done an RTTY contest and it showed.  What
little prep time I had before the contest got spent tweaking N1MM/MMTTY to make
it tolerable (and still didnt get a lot of it right until late Sunday) and there
was nary a thought to band strategies, off times, and all that normal contest
planning "stuff".  Saturday night I ran across Mr RTTY, K4GMH, and he was like
400 q's ahead of me!  Man, was I bummed out!  It's a lot worse when you have 18
hours of off-time to THINK about all the stupid mistakes you made and what you
can fix to salvage the operation...or not.  Or think about all the other family
stuff I could have been doing instead of playing in this stupid contest! Sheesh!
Oh, but then I got my head out of my a@@ and moved on! hi! By Sunday, I had
fixed some of my operational issues such as inefficient macros and learning
enough of the hot-keys that I almost never had to make a panicked reach for the
mouse!  Late Sunday I made a second pass through the keyboard macros and canned
messages and fixed up a bunch of latencies there and thought, "Yeah, now that
the contest is almost over, you're starting to get the old groove back!"  Well
I did close the gap on Mike a bit at the end, but I'll have to wait until the
next one to find out if I learned (or re-learned) anything!

Boy I remember back in the early 70's when I was a pup and it was K4GMH and
W3EKT at the top of the RTTY leader board...with about 300 QSOs! LOL!  Ahhh,
nothin' like the smell of machine oil in the morning, huh Mike?

Since packet is free in this contest, I decided I just had to use my modern
computer stuff and tolerate the short-comings of MMTTY and the mouse-centricity
of Windoze and N1MM.  That side-tracked me into a "log-then-grab or pop" macros
discussion of call stacking and it degenerated from there.  Hey, it's cool when
it works out, but I've determined that it's really only useful for DX operations
or other high-profile operations where you know the guy that's 3rd in the stack
is going to stick around for his QSO.  From my big-gun stateside operation, I
think I got about 1/2 of my two-high stacks to stick around for their QSO. 
It's really cool when it works out and it does save time...half the time.  The
other half you lose because you spent a little more time gathering the calls on
the front-side and lots more time sending them an exchange which they wont hear.
 I dont think I ever got a 3-high to work.  Guess I need to make another trip to
Aruba to find out if it's a worthwhile feature!  Yeah, that's the ticket!  I did
make a concious effort to avoid reaching fo the mouse and I have to say I was
almost completely successful.  There were just a few times where MMTTY seemed
to have a mind of its own and required some readjusting using the dreaded
mouse.  Notably as someone else mentioned, the AFC occasionally seemed to turn
itself off...

Ah well, enough ranting...time for bed!


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