[3830] SS SSB K4XD SO Unlimited LP

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                    ARRL Sweepstakes Contest, SSB

Call: K4XD
Operator(s): K4XD
Station: K4XD

Class: SO Unlimited LP
QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs): 9.5
Remote Operation

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
  160:     
   80:   12
   40:  113
   20:   28
   15:  104
   10:    4
------------
Total:  261  Sections = 70  Total Score = 36,540

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

You're on a business trip to Paris, France.  All your friends and family look at
you like you are going on one of the biggest boondoggles in history even though
you know it will be wall to wall, dawn to late night meetings and business
dinners.  You arrive a day early to give your body time to adjust to the new
time zone.  Do you:

a) Get some much needed sleep
b) Visit a famous French vineyard and enjoy some great wine
c) Go into Paris to see the sights and have a great meal 
or 
d) Hole up in your hotel room and do Sweepstakes remotely to your radio in the
US so you can give your club some points?

Did you even hesitate for a second with your answer?  The obvious choice is d!
So yes, that's what I did on my November vacation.  After a full-time effort is
SS CW, I knew my time in SS SSB was going to be limited to about 30 minutes as I
had to leave for the airport at 4:30 ET.  Twelve hours of travel during prime SS
SSB time meant a full-time effort was out of the question, but maybe I could get
the remote operation working well enough to experience that legendary "be
fresh meat Sunday afternoon" experience!

I have done quite a bit of remote CW operating, using a code reader to
visualize the dots and dashes (I don't trust the translation into text but I
can "read" -.-. .--), but hardly any SSB and I was really concerned
about latency, especially from Europe.  But, nothing ventured... it's a fairly
easy setup (famous last words) minus the gremlins, and there were plenty of
them.  Nothing fancy - I use the free LogMeIn.com to see the screen, and Skype
for audio.  Once you realize that Skype just wants you to specify a
"speaker" (output) and a "microphone" (input), and you make
those the sound channels to your radio, it works like a champ.  

As far as station control goes, I was limited to what I can do sitting in front
of my computer at home and not touching the radio, which turned out to create
some problems, but there were not insurmountable.  I had used VSPEmulator
(Virtual Serial Port Emulator) to set up "splitters," which are
virtual serial ports that allow more than one connection.  This let me have
both DXLab Commander and WriteLog running to control my radio via CAT, which
was a good thing.  I found it easy to tune up the band with Commander's
keyboard commands than with WriteLog, but I used WriteLog's DVK (Digital Voice
Keyer) to send pre-recorded exchange information directly to the radio.  Yes,
it shares the sound channels nicely with Skype, so I could also use the headset
connected to my laptop in Paris and Skype'd to the home PC.

So ... a little bit complicated but no real additional cost to what I use
locally.

How did it all work?

Better than I expected!

Most of us have had horrible hotel Internet that felt like 300 baud, and at
other times, pretty darn fast connections.  It's a roll of the dice, but very
fortunately, the Ibis hotel in Masions-Lafitte, France (just outside Paris) has
whomping good Wifi and my Skype and LogMeIn connection speed was great.  It did
drop completely about 3 times, but only took a minute to reconnect.  At local
midnight, it did start going south and dropping completely, but I was going
south at that point too from lack of sleep, so it was a good excuse to shut
down and call it a day.

Latency was surprisingly not an issue - I felt like I could use the headset to
answer requests for fills without an embarrassing delay.  
For some reason, I couldn't get the "shifted-SSB" set of prerecorded
messages to work in WriteLog's DVK, although the unshifted SSB (hit a function
key) worked fine.  But, this had a bright side - when I hit shift-F2, the
radio's PTT was engaged, and that let me use my headset to transmit.  Hitting
ESC put the radio back into receive mode.  A little awkward, and I'm still
trying to find a simple PTT button in WriteLog, but it did work.

My goal at the start was to get at least 100 Q's for PVRC, so a drop in the
bucket but a combination of radio fun and team spirit motivated me to give it a
shot.  I got on at 1145 UTC on 80M and made about 12 Q's before some keyboard
combination caused the volume control to spike somewhere in the audio chain and
the receive audio became horribly over modulated and distorted.  I called my XYL
and sat her in front of the MK2R+ and Icom 756 Pro II while I opened the manuals
for both on my laptop - it's amazing how you get so used to turning the dials
that you forget what it says on the panels! - and walked her through some
experiments.  Twiddling the AF / RF gain knobs on the Icom seemed to get things
back into shape, so I can only guess that I sent some bad CAT command that
caused the gain to be cranked way up.  That cost me an hour but got me back in
business and only recurred one time, toward the very end of my participation.
At 1320 I decided it was time to move to 40 and continued with S&P for
almost an hour.  It was hard to get the rate much over 40/hour so I decided to
give running a try.  This was a little scary as my PTT arrangement was new and
clumsy, and with S&P I had been doing almost everything with the canned
exchanges.  But it turned out to be pretty easy, not really any harder than
S&P.  I apologize for the Robo-Exchange but I figured both latency and
voice quality would be better and more reliable if I let WriteLog (running on
the home PC right next to the radio) drive the DVK while I used LogMeIn to
click the buttons in WriteLog from my remote laptop.  

While I didn't have any neck snapping speeds I did manage to get a small pileup
of three or four callers and the rate hit 100/hour for a while.  Thanks to those
who spotted me - it made a difference!  I never asked to be spotted but boy was
it tempting.  Staring at the bandmap, hoping to see K4XD appear at my run
frequency... especially when business was slow... quite a difference from SS
CW, with Skimmers spotting you within seconds of starting your run.  It
emphasizes the importance of manually spotting during phone and RTTY tests
(although RTTY Skimmers are growing in popularity), and I tried to send a few
spots myself when I was doing S&P.

I managed to work all bands during 9.5 hours of operating.  40 was the most
productive, with 15 close behind.  20 was tough for me as I never really found
a decent run frequency running LP.  My hours of operation were not suited for
80 but it was still fun for the first hour.  I had a couple of q's on 10M but
for some reason I was not really getting out there.  Toward late afternoon ET,
15 went long, and stations in WWA reported I was blowing their ears off while
stations in IN/IL were asking for fills.  I could hear a lot of stations to my
North on 15, and they were louder when I was beaming West, but they mostly
could not hear me.  Turning the beam North made it worse.  So, while I was
surprised to get 70 sections with a part-time, remote effort, I missed some
that would be easy from home such as three of the four Ontario's.  

Once I got the audio straightened out, it was a lot of fun.  I never got the
high rates I was expecting from being "fresh meat" on Sunday,
although a late afternoon run on 40 generated some spots and a small pileup for
half an hour.  I blew through the orignal goal of 100 Q's, and decided to go for
200.  At 198 I had the distorted audio problem again, and was tempted to hang it
up, but couldn't do it that close to 200 so called the XYL who once again got
things fixed.  By that time there were a lot of fresh spots to work so I got at
it and set my sights on 30K points, and added a 6K point margin for safety.

So... a drop in the bucket, but better than nothing and a learning experience
to boot!

Thanks for the Q's, sorry for the Robo-voice, and CU in the next one!

73,
Rowland K4XD


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