[3830] ARRLDX SSB PI4TUE M/S HP

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                    ARRL DX Contest, SSB

Call: PI4TUE
Operator(s): CLAUDIA, ON9CC, PA3FGA, PA5MW, PA5YL, PC5A
Station: PI4TUE

Class: M/S HP
QTH: 
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:   18    10
   80:  157    31
   40:  473    48
   20:  565    50
   15:  865    58
   10:  370    40
-------------------
Total: 2448   237  Total Score = 1,739,817

Club: Bavarian Contest Club

Comments:

Mission almost accomplished!

In summary:
Target to beat was # of QSO's and or Score of 2002:
        QSOs    Score
2002    2653    1.77M
2013    2448    1.74M

That roughly translates to 4-5 multipliers or 40 QSO's...

The story:

PI4TUE's personal best score in the ARRLDX-SSB dated back to 2002 where PA3EZL
and PE1PRG racked up 2653 QSO's and 1.77M points. That was the target we had
set for the 2013 edition, despite the lacking cooperation of the SUN (in 2002
the solar flux was close to 200 in the ARRLDX SSB weekend, now only about
110).

The Setup was the same as two weeks ago:

Ten-Tec ORION
160m sloper at 220ft (RX: BOG, 80M long @10cm from the ground)
80m full size horizontal loop at 220ft
40m dipole @200ft
3el SteppIR @220ft
N1MM Logger

Three team members met at the station Friday around 16:00h and started the
routine of setting up the 40M dipole and BOG; two additions we initiated in
2013 and have proven their merits. Before completing the fourth team member
checked in just before 19:00h and we decided to first have dinner at our
favorite Italian restaurant (we can recommend the Calzone pizza) and on the way
back stopped at a Turkish deli where we bought two boxes of delicious Turkish
pastry (a.o. baklava). The last three hours before the start were spent with
rolling out the coax between the shack and the BOG (200m of  satellite coax
still needed to be rolled out from 200ft down to almost ground level and then
another 450ft to the BOG feed-point), setting up and preparing the hardware and
software in the shack.

At 00:00Z Claudia did the honors of opening the contest on 40M where it took 6
minutes to log the first QSO after K3WW answered our CQ. The following 11
minutes only 3 stations were worked. A cluster spot at 00:19Z finally got
things going... the modern days of contesting (in CW you rely on RBN, in SSB
you need man made spots)

I took over in the third hour of the contest and soon noticed that the new
experimental feature in N1MM Logger (DX spots are searched for state
information that is used in the bandmap / available window to indicate if it's
a mult or not) was not working for me at all.. In fact there were hardly any
spots showing up, red nor blue. I checked the packet filters on the two
networked PC's but couldn't find any clues; I decided to revert to the released
latest version of the program, hoping not to loose to much time. At home the
feature did work... most likely the root cause was still a setting  on one or
both PC's.

The night progressed slowly but since in 2002 the Op's went to bed at 02:00Z we
expected to get ahead to compensate for the expected poorer propagation on the
high bands this time. Between 05 and 06Z when Frank-ON9CC took over from me the
reoccurring nightly dip was there... 6 QSO's in one hour. We noticed this also
during the last PACC: hour 5 seems to be our worst hour.

>From 11Z onwards things picked up and we moved from 20 to 15 and even 10m.
Chantal-PA5YL managed to get 6 stations into the log within one minute, she was
the only one of the team to do this... the female touch? The two band approach
gave us a lead because in 2002 we spent the whole afternoon and evening on 10M
only.

After 24 hours our lead was 150k. We were not able to use the following night
to significantly increase the lead and at Sunday 12Z we lost it, our current
score  was dropping  below the one of 2002 more and more to 300k at 15Z... But
then 10M opened up much better than on Saturday and Mark-PA5MW sat down and had
a ball for about two hours with last 10 rate peaking nearly to 500. The
following run on 15M was very productive as well where I logged 169 the first
hour and 114 the next. At 19:30Z Claudia took over and she racked up another 71
QSO's totaling that hour at 134 Q's. The gap with 2002 had shrunk again...
Yes..! We could still beat the score. 20M was also productive and just before
20M died completely around 22Z the gap was merely a couple of thousand points
(5 QSO's or so). The three of us (Claudia, Rens-PA3FGA and I) got exited and
attacked 40M in split mode. This had worked out very nicely the night before.
Sadly the hourly QSO rate dropped to 45 and 23 the last two hours giving just 2
new multipliers, K0HA and VO2NS. At literally 23:59:59Z I logged the last
station W8ZA. When all the smoke cleared we looked at the score... 1.73M,
missing the target by 0.05M. It felt like a victory though since we knew from
the start it was going to be tough with this propagation. The past 11 years of
experimenting and gaining experience got us to this point and it shows how you
can keep improving even with limited resources.

Some statistics from the log:
The following stations where worked on 6 bands:
AD4Z     K1KI    K1LZ     K3LR    K4JPD    N2NT    N3RR    N3RS    N4WW   
VY2TT    W2PV    W3LPL    W4RM    WK1Q

Top 3 of Sections worked (across all bands) which are the sections as in the
ARRLDX CW two weeks ago:
PA: 231
NY: 161
FL: 158

Bottom 3 of Sections worked:
BC,SD   : 3
ID,LB,NV: 2
AB      : 1

Clean sweep of US states per band: non (for that we missed ND on 15M)

Best 73 to you all
-- Aurelio, PC5A


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