[3830] SPDX RTTY VA7ST SOAB HP

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                    SPDX RTTY Contest

Call: VA7ST
Operator(s): VA7ST
Station: VA7ST

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: 
Operating Time (hrs): 

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   80:           
   40:    3     1
   20:  121    44
   15:    6     1
   10:           
-------------------
Total:  130    46  Continents = 5  Total Score = 239,890

Club: Orca DX and Contest Club

Comments:

Conditions were not good at all, but good enough to double my previous best. I
missed any really good European opening from the west during the day (see
below) but late in the night there were lots of callers when I did get around
to CQing over the pole. Those 10-pointers added up to a much stronger score
than previous years. 

Missed South America entirely. Where were they in this one? 

ZS6WB and KH6GMP calling in for two continents around 9 p.m. local time on 20M
were great surprises. JA7IC in the late evening on 20M was my only JA contact.

Rodents (voles) have destroyed my backyard all-band vertical's radial wires,
and a raccoon or some other larger creature gnawed through my feedline. Stuck
without a second-radio antenna for the high bands, early on Saturday morning
the driven element of my venerated ol' Mosley Classic 33 got pressed into
service after four years of languishing in storage. I tied a cable to the
element centre and a rope to one tip, and pulled it up about 40 feet to use as
a vertical dipole, literally suspended in free space from a high elm tree
branch.

Sadly, 15M was in no shape for a contest, and I only landed 6 contacts and one
country. Still, I called CQ a few hundred times to get those few responses.

Spent as much time twiddling with MMTTY and N1MM configurers as I did making
contacts. Even the fast new computer hasn't done away with lagging in N1MM with
MMTTY. Suspecting hard-drive latency, part way in I decided to move the N1MM
install to a solid-state drive to see if moving off an old, slow (SATA) hard
drive helped. 

Three hours later I had FSK keying the rig again -- after trying a couple of
directory locations to get everything working in Windows 8 (pronounced Windows
Hate). It works again, but I can't say things are 100% stable in the new
operating system. Restarting is a guessing game as to whether the USB and
serial ports will work or not.

Bottom line: if you get stuff working in Windows 8, leave it alone or spend
hours trying to "black-magic" things back into operation. Legacy
software seems to suffer myriad inscrutable issues in this new OS, even in
"compatibility mode." But when things got working, they worked fine
business. The old hard drive was at least part of the latency problem.

Thanks for the contacts -- great to work so many SP stations despite the poor
conditions.

-- Bud VA7ST

http://www.orcadxcc.org
http://www.va7st.ca/home.html

2013  SOABHP    130     46     239,890
2012  SOABHP     95     35     106,400
2011  SOABHP    111     27      77,328 
2010  SOABHP     49     13      10,374  
2008  SOABHP    159     13      41,912
2007  SOABLP     28      6       3,648
2006  SOABLP     78     23      41,492
2005  SOABLP     73     26      41,730
2004  SOABLP     79     17      41,565


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