[3830] NA Sprint RTTY K3FIV LP

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                    NA Sprint RTTY Contest - March

Call: K3FIV
Operator(s): K3FIV
Station: K3FIV

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 4

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Op Time
---------------------
   80:  28         
   40:  39         
   20:  14         
---------------------
Total:  81     Mults = 23  Total Score = 1,863

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Team: NCCC #2

Comments:

My first Sprint format contest, so the goal was simply to learn.  The first few
minutes I just listened to the frenzy.  Couldn't copy anyone long enough before
they moved!  

I also discovered that I need a new PC.  My old one does a good job at running
the Flex radio software, and it even runs N1MM and MMTTY which I've used in
other contests.  But I discovered that Sprint doesn't tolerate delays.  RTTY
decoding was lagging sometimes 2+ seconds behind the signal, which made waiting
for the name/state info to appear was painful - sometimes the other guy would
repeat when I didn't reply fast enough because my PC was still thinking about
his text.  I turned off one of the N1MM/MMTTY setups (was running SO2V to try
that out) and dropping back to one decoder helped a bit.

Murphy visited in the form of a power outage right in the middle of the
contest.  Came back a few minutes later but it took a while to get all the
software running again.

I like the Sprint format and was pretty comfortable with it by the end.  But
how do you keep track of how far away you are from the "forbidden zone"?  In
other contests I usually keep a 30KHz or so chunk of the band on the display,
so I can see where the other stations are and go hunting.  But it's hard to
remember where I made the last Q.  With my LP/wire setup I don't win jump
balls, so I move around a lot.  So I would try to look at the frequency in the
log and do the mental arithmetic before calling CQ or Pouncing.  Not sure if I
got it right or not.  Maybe there's some trick with N1MM to use the Bandmap?

Bands seemed OK but a little noisy.  At the end it was hard to find new
stations, especially since when I found one, they'd move!  Reminds me of our
cats chasing small critters out in the garden.   Makes the contest more
interesting.

Rig: Flex-3000, 100W, N1MM, MMTTY
Ant: OCF Carolina Windom dipole at 35 feet

73,
/Jack


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