[3830] CQ WW RTTY 6Y6U(W1UE) SOAB HP

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                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY

Call: 6Y6U
Operator(s): W1UE
Station: 6Y1V

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Jamaica
Operating Time (hrs): 40
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  QSOs   Pts   State/Prov  DX   Zones
-------------------------------------------
   80:  132    301       36      26    11
   40:  742   1914       51      62    20
   20:  587   1475       53      69    24
   15: 1271   3362       53      76    25
   10: 1120   3085       54      61    28
-------------------------------------------
Total: 3852  10137      247     294    98  Total Score = 6,477,543

Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club

Comments:

Rigs: 2x IC7800
Amps: 2x Aco 2000A
Antennas: 80M 4 square
40M Stacked SteppIR Monsters at 130/70ft
20M: 6/6 yagis at 100/50 ft
15M: 7/7 yagis at 65/32 ft
10M: 7/7 yagis at 55/28
The top SteppIR was fully rotatable; the yagis, due to an unfortunate snag with
a guy wire, were rotatable from 20 to 120deg.  They worked FB to Europe, not as
good to USA or JA.

Wow, that was a hoot!  I arrived here a week early; talking to K1LZ, the
station owner, no one had been there for over a year.  I found that no antennas
would rotate, the 80M Comtek relay was under water (luckily, turned out it
wasn't), tops missing off two of the 80M verticals, the antennas switching
panel unwired, 2 computers with dead BIOS batteries (which I didn't know about
until I arrived on island), no Internet access (which I did know about), and
other assorted little things that needed to be resolved.  Good thing I arrived
early, because those items and configuring/setting up the FSK keying on the
computers took all of that time.  I won't bore you with the details, but even
finding the CMOS batteries in Montego Bay was a challenge!

The contest started fairly slowly; I started on 15/20 then switched to 20/40
and had some good runs on 40.  My SO2R style was to constantly CQ on the 2
bands of choice; my design of an SO3R system will have to wait another year, as
I had my hands full just getting the SO2R system set up.  I had planned to use
my SO2R Box to do the FSK keying, but all the computer produced was gibberish
through it.  I found a way around it by buying two 1s1p add-in boards for the
desktop computer; after I sent out a plea on the N1MM reflector, W5OV gave me a
 tip on finding new drivers for the Prolific chipset USB to Serial converters;
that gave me back radio control for both radios.  Getting to that point,
however, with the rest of the work that had to be done, took me to Thursday.

Started the contest and hit my first problem: the PTT on Radio 1 stayed keyed,
and the radio in transmit, for an extra 5 seconds after the message was
finished; okay, I've seen that before, so reboot the computer.  Did so, then
the PTT on Radio 2 would hang the same way.  Rebooting again, radio 1 would
hang.  I then went back to the MMTTY setup and found a check box incorrectly
set; 35 minutes into the contest, I was ready to go!  Then, for some reason,
the computer decided it wanted to reboot.  This computer, when rebooting and I
had to re-enter the programs, created 2 minutes of downtime.  The computer
would reboot itself every so often for the next 10 hours, until I decided that
going into the morning runs with this was unacceptable.  I then swapped out the
AC power cord to the computer, and it stopped rebooting.  Seems one of the power
connections was just a little lose, and every so often it would lose connection,
power, then not just shut off but reboot.  If it had shut itself down and stayed
off, diagnosis would have been easier.  During the night, I tried to operate
80M, but the amp kept shutting itself off.  No noise, no lights, no sound; I'd
look over and it'd be off.  It didn't turn off while transmitting, just while
it was sitting there.  Solved this problem by using the other radio/amp combo
on 80M.

I made it up all night, and didn't feel too badly.  Had some nice morning runs,
but surprisingly to me 20M just was never there.  15 and 10 were hopping from
7AM to 7pm local, but I could just never get anything going on 20M.  Same with
80M; I could work anyone I could hear, there just wasn't anyone there to work!
The first night on 80M was also noisy; the second night was much quieter.

Not having beams that could fully rotate, and losing too much rate when
substituting the SteppIrs on the high bands when I could, I stuck it out and
figured that mults would just have to call me.  There were 3 or 4 times that I
hunted mults during the contest, and could only pick up a couple each time.  I
just stuck to CQing on my 2 bands of choice.  All day that was 10/15M; at night
it was usually 20/40 or 40/80.  After working 28 hours straight, I finally
crashed about 11pm local Saturday night after having dinner with the Queen of
England.  I started hallucinating badly, and had to think to operate the keys;
the previous week's work got to me.  I'm told I had dinner with the Queen of
England, although I don't remember it.  I finally decided I had to sleep, and
slept through 2 alarms before the 3rd one got me up.  After the 6 hour nap, I
was good to go for the rest of the contest.

Various stats:
Average 96 Qs/Hr for the hours of operation.
Top hour was 151 Qs
Top clock hour was 136 Qs
The Queen of England likes too sugar cubes in her evening tea.

Many thanks to Krassy K1LZ for the use of his KB station.  Analysis of this
year's results have already started, to see what I could do differently. 
Congrats to K1FWE, who broke my USA SOABHP record set just last year.  The only
question is, did anyone beat him?

Thanks to everyone for the Qs.

Dennis 6Y6U
aka W1UE


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