[3830] CQWW CW N1EU SOAB(A) HP

[webform at b41h.net]

                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW

Call: N1EU
Operator(s): N1EU
Station: N1EU

Class: SOAB(A) HP
QTH: Albany NY
Operating Time (hrs): 27.9

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:   37    13       34
   80:   96    18       65
   40:  263    29      108
   20:  407    38      131
   15:  666    32      129
   10:  716    31      129
------------------------------
Total: 2185   161      596  Total Score = 4,783,483

Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club

Comments:

I went into the contest hoping to do some experimenting to try and improve
pileup readability, which has frustrated me a bit in the past with the K3. 
I’ve recently done some modifications to a 15 year old Omni 6+ and I ended up
using it for most of the contest.  The bottom line is that I don’t notice a
night and day difference between the K3, Omni 6+ and my Orion.  If I had to
guess, I’d say the Orion is slightly better than the K3 and the Omni 6+ is
slightly better than the Orion but I wouldn’t swear to it.  I did notice that
with AGC turned off, the Omni 6+ is definitely more responsive to changes in RF
Gain than the K3/Orion.  But far beyond the slight pileup readability
improvements, I was amazed at how quiet the Omni 6+ receiver can be.  Weak
signals sounded “pure”, as they popped above a quiet background â€" a real
pleasure to listen to.  It also seemed like the really weak signals were
slightly more readable.  With 600hz IR roofing filter in place, the Omni 6+
seems to give up nothing in close-in IMD immunity compared to the K3 and Orion.
 However, the K3 and Orion have arguably a much more substantial control
foundation for contesting and I must admit to being somewhat of a
subreceiver/diversity addict.  I’ll continue to experiment in the future with
these three radios.

I ended the contest satisfied with my productivity for the amount of time in
the chair (tad under 28 hours).  Inspired by K1LI’s post, I did a little
analysis of my own.  I spent 30% of the time running with an average 149 run
rate that yielded 57% of my qso’s.  I would have spent more time running if
my main 40M antenna hadn’t bit the dust Friday night.  I was left with just a
single dipole oriented NW/SE, at right angles to Europe.  On a positive note,
the new-to-me 3-element SteppIR up 60ft continues to impress.

Although I greatly appreciated all the spots from the RBN (skimmer/reverse
beacon network), I still feel a great improvement would be more screening
(“CQ” and callsign database validation) by the skimmer servers.  I noticed
myself and others spotted numerous times when calling dx.  And there sure
wouldn’t be a downside to eliminating all the LW3LPL and “EK” spots. 
Losing potential spots of dx not in the database would be a small price to pay
for really cleaning up the RBN contest spots.  And those “lost” spots can
always be entered the old fashioned way by human ops.  I got a laugh at one
point when I glanced up at my cluster client screen â€" have a look at
http://n1eu.com/skimmer_spots.gif - the irony of W3LPL spotting itself as
LW3LPL and W4LPL.  

Thanks for all the q's and apologies to those who I couldn't pull out.

73,
Barry N1EU


Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/