[3830] IARU N5AW SO SSB LP

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                    IARU HF World Championship

Call: N5AW
Operator(s): N5AW
Station: N5AW

Class: SO SSB LP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): 5

Summary:
 Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs  Zones  HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
  160:                           
   80:                           
   40:          28     13      10
   20:          70     22      23
   15:          44     14      19
   10:           5      2       1
-------------------------------------
Total:   0     147     53      51  Total Score = 48,360

Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club

Comments:

I recently acquired a K3/0 primarily to allow me to operate my Texas station
when we make periodic trips to our vacation home in Colorado. This was our
first trip there since the K3/0 purchase and I was looking forward to operating
the IARU contest at least "semi-seriously" via remote. Unfortunately I
found the Internet connection in Colorado left a lot to be desired. There are
frequent short drop outs that sound like a loose connection, others that last
for a second or so and then occasionally it just goes away for several minutes.
The frequent "loose connection" dropouts mangle CW and these are
frequent enough, even with a long latency time in the software, to make CW sent
over the Internet a challenge. Being primarily a CW operator I had never checked
out voice operation remotely with the K3/0. When I discovered all the problems
with CW I thought perhaps I could operate phone remotely thanks to the K3
memories. When I connected a mic to the K3/0 though nothing happened.
Apparently I had failed to plug the RemoteRig microphone connection into the K3
back home. Fortunately I had recorded my call and exchange in the voice memories
in the K3 before leaving (I failed to do that for CW and you can only program
the K3 CW memories with a paddle plugged into the radio). Using the K3's
memories overcomes the Internet noise problems. With my call and the exchange
recorded it is possible to make S&P contacts with no microphone so I
decided to operate the SSB portion of the contest remotely with the Texas
station as N5AW and CW from Colorado as N5AW/0. (See N5AW/0 write-up for those
not very impressive results)

Actually things went pretty smooth on SSB except when the other station got my
call wrong. All you could do was keep repeating it hoping he would eventually
get it right. This resulted in a couple of stations, who continued to copy my
call as N9AW despite multiple repeats, getting rather frustrated with me. Not
much you can do though. The other problem was when they got your call correct
and asked you to confirm it. Sending the report did not seem enough for some
and repeating my call implied they had it wrong. Would have been nice if I
would have recorded "roger" or "QSL". Needless to say all
my QSOs were S&P.

It was also interesting to hear the propagation differences between Texas and
Colorado. 15 meters was much better to Europe from Texas but at times 20 was at
least as good from Colorado even though I was just using a vertical compared to
a 4 element yagi in Texas. The Colorado QTH is on an east sloping hill. That
helps to Europe and South America but makes working East Asia and the Pacific
more difficult than from Texas despite being closer.

Not sure if both of these scores can be submitted but they are not very
competitive anyway. Regardless, it was an interesting experience.


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