[3830] RTTY WPX P49X(W0YK) SOAB HP
webform at b41h.net
webform at b41h.net
Mon Feb 13 07:41:45 PST 2012
CQ WW RTTY WPX Contest
Call: P49X
Operator(s): W0YK
Station: P40L/P49Y
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Aruba
Operating Time (hrs): 30
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
80: 259
40: 933
20: 273
15: 1088
10: 988
------------
Total: 3541 Prefixes = 875 Total Score = 12,351,500
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
WPX is a low-band contest and the 2012 RTTY event really demonstrated that from
Aruba. With twice the points for QSOs on 40 and 80 meters, compared to 10, 15
and 20 meters, final score is very dependent on the low bands. At P49X, total
QSOs and prefixes were nearly the same between 2011 and 2012, but score is 11%
lower:
Year 2011 2012
QSOs-low 1585 1192
QSOs-high 2026 2349
QSOs-total 3611 3541
Mults 895 876
Score 13.9M 12.4M
In summary, there were 70 less total QSOs, but 393 QSO that shifted from
6-pointers to 3-pointers. That coupled with 19 less mults had a tremendous
impact on score.
The first two hours of the contest rank down there with the worst I’ve
experienced! Signals on 40 and 80 were relatively strong but the RTTY audio
sounded weird. It’s hard to describe in words, but the audio wasn’t clean
and clear. There was some combination of echo and hollowness. All my decoders
thought so too because achieving clear print was extremely difficult. After
struggling to get a call sign, it took several repeats to get a serial number
that I had any confidence in. My F10 “NR?†key has aged considerably from
over-use this weekend. I apologize to for all the repeat requests. Sue,
P40YL, reported the same receive problem, but Roger, PJ4R, didn’t notice any
problem on 40m over in Bonaire.
I estimate that 19 out of every 20 QSOs required at least one repeat on 40/80
during the first few hours. That killed rate and compounding this further, 18
out of those 19 repeat requests (NR?) were answered with “P49X DE XY4ABC 599
005 005 P49Xâ€. Invariably, the serial number got garbled on the repeat and
we had to go another round. If the other station had a message key with only
the serial number, they could have simply tapped it 3-4 times to send a message
less than half as long but with much higher probability of enough clear copy to
allow me to figure out the serial number. Once I had at least two numbers that
were the same, I logged it. RTTY contesters could greatly benefit by paying
attention to the repeat request. When a station asks for “NR?â€, all you
need to send is the serial number! If they want to hear RST and everyone’s
call sign again, they will send “AGNâ€. Although, even when I hear
“AGN†I still only send my serial number several times and that always
seems to satisfy the other station.
In the first 8 hours, I was down almost 400 QSOs from 2011 with an average rate
of less than 100/hour compared to 134/hour last year. This was extremely
discouraging, especially since I was completely worn out from the frustrating
struggle to copy call signs and serial numbers. I even asked myself if maybe
it would make more sense to abandon the contest and go get some beach time for
the rest of the weekend! But, of course, that was an even worse alternative
than simply sucking it up and doing the best I could with whatever conditions
and activity presented me with.
I was greatly relieved when the knee of my rate curve drop-off occurred around
08z. I was overdue for a nap and some time away from the radio. And, despite
half-points on 10-20, I was really looking forward to some high-band operation
Saturday morning. Even under the best of conditions, though, I knew it was
improbable to recover from the disastrous first 8 hours on 40/80 meters. But,
the important challenge for me is to do the best I can with things out of my
control and there were more out-of-my-control surprises ahead of me that I
didn’t foresee.
I didn’t rush to get back on until the high bands were really in solid.
Although all three bands were open to Europe at our sunrise, I waited a few
hours in order to spend my limited single-op time with the maximum rate.
However, I was not able to achieve the peak rates that I had in 2011. Last
year I had a 176 and a 188 clock hour on 15/20, but this year those same peak
hours (17-18z) were 158 and 160 on 10/15. Basically, my two primary high band
choices moved up a band this year. 20m QSOs went from 1035 down to 273 while
10m QSOs went from 2 up to 988. 15m went from 989 to 1088 as well.
Looking deeper at the rates per band, 10m had nearly 100 QSOs/hour while 15m
only had 60. The “problem†with 15m was QSB, requiring more repeats (which
I was very familiar with!) and even some abandoned QSOs. Both Saturday and
Sunday, I found 10m to be more solid than 15m with respect to QSB although not
immune. When the rate began to sag in the 19Z hour, I took a one-hour break
and finished my (now very cold) breakfast at 3pm local time. My decision point
for breaks was 150/hour on the high bands and 75/hour on the low bands.
However, by this time I knew that I had to be less aggressive due to relatively
lower rates than 2011.
Some time Saturday I had my 15m run annihilated by “QST QST QST DE W1AW W1AW
W1AW …â€! Innocently, I had been running on the ARRL bulletin frequency for
several hours and they just start transmitting without listening on “theirâ€
frequency. That is a first for me and a learning to store away. I need to
look up those frequencies and avoid them like I do the oft-used PSK
frequencies, e.g. 14070-2.
But the mother of all surprises came at 2345z Saturday when the power grid went
off for this entire area of the island! This has never been a consideration
here because the power system has been very reliable. This was another first
for me after a decade of visiting Aruba. Of course, 2345z was prime time on
40m where I needed more of those 6-pointers to make up for the prior night.
The thought of quitting entered my mind again, but instead I coached myself,
“No quitting allowed. A major component of the competition is how you deal
with surprises and other variables.†So, I had a glass of wine and a bit of
cheese, salami and fruit. Then, I got into bed with all the light switches on
so I could get as much rest as possible before the power came back.
Fortunately, power was off only an hour, but it took a few minutes to reboot my
three computers, reload WriteLog, setup all my decoder windows, initialize
VE7CC-User and Packet, and then find run frequencies on 20 and 40.
The rate drop-off occurred about an hour earlier the second night on 40/80 and
I was ready for an even longer nap than the prior evening. I had less than 7
hours operating time left so I planned to catch the best 7 hours of 10/15 on
Sunday. That provided a good 4 hours of sleep, time to fully awaken and have
some breakfast, and a start time close to 15z. Sunday high-band rates were
better this year, but not nearly enough to make up for the low-band deficit.
My 30 hours ran out at 2122z, later than I’ve ever operated WPX RTTY from
Aruba. I immediately shaved, showered and drove over to P43A and P43C’s QTH
(Jean-Pierre and Chris Lauwereys) to take them up to Noord where P49V and P40YL
(Carl and Sue Cook) treated us to dinner at a favorite local restaurant. It was
J-P’s birthday so we had something more pleasant to celebrate than the
contest! Sue and I were most happy to get our minds off the contest we’d
just finished. After a nice evening with friends, I returned back to the
cottage at 11:30pm with little energy to file a 3830 report.
In retrospect, perhaps I should have expected less out of the low bands,
especially 80m. This is to be expected as the MUF moves higher. On the other
hand, this weekend’s solar forecast had degraded over the past month as it
fell from a SFI peak of 150-155 on 11-12 February to 100. Then, on Friday, the
prognosticators raised it back up to 110-120. It probably wasn’t realistic to
expect 80m to do as well as 2011.
This is the second contest I’ve done with a SO4V configuration and I have to
say that this is ideal for WPX RTTY where there is only one single-op entry
category and Packet assistance is allowed. The WriteLog K3 drivers allow both
receivers in each radio to constantly feed their own decoding window. This
provides constant monitoring of the run frequency while pouncing on spots on
the same band. The K3 transmitter simply goes into SPLIT mode to transmit on
the sub-receiver frequency with a single key stroke to exit SPLIT and resume
QSOs on the run frequency. I can’t see how to make it any more efficient and
with Packet identifying the mults, this is a real benefit for this contest.
I downloaded and used VE7CC-User for the first time and ran it on my third
computer which the two radio computers linked to. With its automatic reconnect
feature, I never had to mess with Packet the whole weekend. Instead, the two
bandmaps on each radio were always current the mults and unworked stations
available to me. Hats off to Lew for a great piece of software!
Finally, unlike our CQ WW CW experience last November, the cottage wireless
system and WriteLog networking was solid and flawless the entire weekend. The
logs on all three computers were constantly the same. A couple times one of
the PCs dropped off the network, but WriteLog transparently reconnected it with
no intervention on my part. The logs sync’d up and the summary boxes read
identically across all PCs. When the power mains came back on Saturday night,
the wireless Internet system came up immediately, again with no action by me.
Thanks once again to everyone for working P49X and providing a rate-fest for us
down here. As always, I’m very appreciative of P40L/W6LD and P49Y/AE6Y for
sharing their wonderful cottage station with me. Andy comes in Wednesday for a
single-op in ARRL DX CW. Conditions should be bit better than this weekend.
Ed
P.S. My email Inbox is filling up with robot questions. Please QRX until I
can work my way through the messages and respond. I actually sent some test
logs through the robot last week and it looked fine to me, so hopefully the
issues are minor. But, thanks for your prompt log submittals!
-------------- Q S O R a t e S u m m a r y ---------------------
Hour 160 80 40 20 15 10 Rate Total Pct
--------------------------------------------------------------------
0000 0 12 70 0 0 0 82 82 2.3
0100 0 19 66 0 0 0 85 167 4.7
0200 0 35 87 0 0 0 122 289 8.2
0300 0 24 84 0 0 0 108 397 11.2
0400 0 28 87 0 0 0 115 512 14.5
0500 0 24 79 0 0 0 103 615 17.4
0600 0 31 80 0 0 0 111 726 20.5
0700 0 24 46 0 0 0 70 796 22.5
0800 0 4 3 0 0 0 7 803 22.7
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 803 22.7
1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 803 22.7
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 803 22.7
1200 0 0 0 9 20 0 29 832 23.5
1300 0 0 0 44 73 0 117 949 26.8
1400 0 0 0 57 75 0 132 1081 30.5
1500 0 0 0 13 70 65 148 1229 34.7
1600 0 0 0 0 53 99 152 1381 39.0
1700 0 0 0 0 63 95 158 1539 43.5
1800 0 0 0 0 60 100 160 1699 48.0
1900 0 0 0 0 7 19 26 1725 48.7
2000 0 0 0 0 58 54 112 1837 51.9
2100 0 0 0 0 85 75 160 1997 56.4
2200 0 0 0 0 64 59 123 2120 59.9
2300 0 0 0 0 12 14 26 2146 60.6
0000 0 0 0 5 0 0 5 2151 60.7
0100 0 0 62 57 0 0 119 2270 64.1
0200 0 0 69 67 0 0 136 2406 67.9
0300 0 7 45 21 0 0 73 2479 70.0
0400 0 22 60 0 0 0 82 2561 72.3
0500 0 24 67 0 0 0 91 2652 74.9
0600 0 5 28 0 0 0 33 2685 75.8
0700 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2685 75.8
0800 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2685 75.8
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2685 75.8
1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2685 75.8
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2685 75.8
1200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2685 75.8
1300 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2685 75.8
1400 0 0 0 0 28 36 64 2749 77.6
1500 0 0 0 0 78 74 152 2901 81.9
1600 0 0 0 0 78 56 134 3035 85.7
1700 0 0 0 0 67 64 131 3166 89.4
1800 0 0 0 0 75 54 129 3295 93.1
1900 0 0 0 0 50 58 108 3403 96.1
2000 0 0 0 0 55 53 108 3511 99.2
2100 0 0 0 0 17 13 30 3541 100.0
2200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3541 100.0
2300 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3541 100.0
------------------------------------------------------
Total 0 259 933 273 1088 988 3541
Gross QSOs=3580 Dupes=39 Net QSOs=3541
Unique callsigns worked = 2305
The best 60 minute rate was 175/hour from 1742 to 1841
The best 30 minute rate was 188/hour from 1755 to 1824
The best 10 minute rate was 222/hour from 1809 to 1818
The best 1 minute rates were:
5 QSOs/minute 11 times.
4 QSOs/minute 129 times.
3 QSOs/minute 426 times.
2 QSOs/minute 609 times.
1 QSOs/minute 474 times.
There were 2074 bandchanges and 1340 (37.8%) probable 2nd radio QSOs.
Number of letters in callsigns
Letters # worked
-----------------
3 5
4 1263
5 1393
6 849
7 11
8 12
9 7
10 1
Multi-band QSOs
---------------
1 bands 1483
2 bands 521
3 bands 203
4 bands 83
5 bands 15
6 bands 0
------- S i n g l e B a n d Q S O s ------
Band 160 80 40 20 15 10
----------------------------------------------
QSOs 0 64 410 88 518 403
80M 40M 20M 15M 10M Total %
NA 200 565 236 553 800 2354 66.5
EU 52 336 13 488 150 1039 29.3
AS 1 11 8 29 3 52 1.5
SA 5 14 11 8 21 59 1.7
AF 1 2 3 6 10 22 0.6
OC 0 4 2 4 4 14 0.4
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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