[3830] CQWW SSB YN2AA(N6GQ) SOAB HP

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                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB

Call: YN2AA
Operator(s): N6GQ
Station: YN2N

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Grenada, Nicaragua
Operating Time (hrs): 45

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:   23     5        9
   80:  222    15       39
   40:  686    28       81
   20: 1717    30      109
   15: 1524    31      107
   10: 1528    30      100
------------------------------
Total: 5700   139      445  Total Score = 7,981,528

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Comments:

My typical novel of a 3830 post follows…as always, read on if you have any
interest…I love reading all these, and its my way of remembering the fun
weekends.

Wow, what more can be said about the fantastic conditions this past weekend?!
In my 30+ years of contesting this has to be one of the top weekends I've ever
experienced, and a great joy to experience it from near the equator.

I'd like to first once again thank my gracious hosts, Octavio (YN2N) and his
wonderful wife Martha. They make my stay there absolutely wonderful. I continue
to say, there is something magical about that volcanic soil that makes the
station play like there's no tomorrow. That, combined with the excellent
conditions made for a very fun trip.

This was my third CQWW SSB from YN, and each time is a bit different. I try to
incorporate things I learn into each one to improve. While I thought I would
improve this year's score over last, it didn't work out that way for a number
of reasons I think. Mostly strategy blunders on my part, and not keeping the
proper perspective and focus where it needed to be. 

Radio/Amp: Elecraft K3, KPA500 (500w) (Thank you, Elecraft, for supplying the
amp!)
Antennas:
10/15/20: Cushcraft A3 @ 60'
40: 2L wire quad fixed on EU/W4, dipole broadside N/S (W8, South America), 3L
fullsize wire yagi fixed on JA/W6
80: Dipole
160: Dipole (using some of the other antennas as RX antennas sometimes)

I had originally planned to do SO2V, using a second radio as the second VFO to
tune around and find multis, kind of a "poor man's SO2R" - but ended
up never using it. So this operation was completely SO1R, completely in the
realm of "Classic" (and non-assisted).

A year or two ago I put together a group of some top contesters to talk about
how we can collectively learn from each other about increasing our performance
both pre and during the contests we all do and love. Today one of our topics
was sleep and how to best deal with sleep before and during the contest. This
is admittedly a very difficult area for me, and it ended up being a problem
this weekend. In years past, I would get 1-2 hours sleep per night, not only to
avoid the sleep deprivation effects, but also because there's really not much
going on in those deep hours of darkness that's really worth much in the long
run. Being fresh for the morning runs (or, fresher) really makes a difference. 
I didn't sleep at all the first night, but felt great by Saturday morning, and
thought "Fantastic!".  The next night I didn't sleep again, and by
Sunday morning, I was a wreck. I couldn't keep my eyes open, and knew if I
didn't do something the rest of the day would be worthless. So I went in around
1500z for an hour nap. Upon waking, I was worse off than before, I was still
tired, but I was completely out of touch with reality - recognizing that I
didn't know how N1MM worked any more, and couldn't figure out how to log a QSO,
and realizing that either I'm just in that state of sleep deprivation, or if
something else was going on. I have some health issues and looking back on it,
I was a little worried I might have been having a small stroke (my feet were
swollen up from sitting for 36 hours straight) and I should have taken measures
to avoid that, but I didn't realize until it was too late what was happening. Oh
well.  Its these kinds of things that pop up in the heat of battle that you
don't know or think about until you're actually there and doing it. This had
never been an issue before, so maybe I'm just getting old. To those that worked
me in the hours after 1500z, I apologize if I was not very with it - I was
really, really out of it. First strategy mistake.

Anyhow, I had just recently returned from a trip to VU/4S7, and another trip to
the US east coast, so I was a bit travel-worn, and had caught a cold in 4S7 that
I was still recovering from, so my throat was still sore and I was somewhat
congested, and this made things a bit rough. As the weekend went on, my voice
got deeper and deeper, and my ability to speak clearly and quickly wasn't what
it was before. Combining this with a few previous evenings of skeds and play on
160 and I had set myself up for a pretty dumb way to start a contest - already
short on sleep and not feeling 100%. But alas, with conditions like that, I was
ready to go! 

Looking back on things, one of the biggest mistakes I made in addition to the
not-sleeping thing was not starting the contest on 10M. Last year, conditions
weren't nearly as good and 20M was clearly the right choice to start. However
this year, I thought that 20M would still be a good band to start on because if
anything it would be better than last year (but it wasn't!). But I think in
retrospect and comparing my scores to others, I didn't spend nearly enough time
on 10M.  I think I lost probably close to 1000 QSOs with this mistake alone.
Strategy mistake number 2. 

I made another calculated strategy decision, and that was to stay outside the
US phone band until after the European runs died down. This would give me two
advantages - 1) I could maximize the european pileups (and hence more 3
pointers and multis) because they are much different than US pileups in terms
of management and 2) I would condense the US pileups into shorter windows, 
thereby reducing the 0-QSO times of what can seem like constant CQing in
between the times when you get spotted. It can go from feeling like there's no
one in the world hearing you, to being overwhelmed by a huge pileup, all over a
matter of seconds due to 1 cluster spot. So the long and short of it is that I
spent too much time in the non-US bands because the European pileups never went
away (and I can't get the rate in the EU pileups)! This lowered my QSO total
significantly because I (again, stupidly) missed the peak rates to the US,
where I should have had high-300's to 400+/hr rates.  Strategy mistake number
3. 

In the days preceding the contest,  I spent some time on 160 trying to give out
a new country to some. Each night there was significant local lightning and try
as I might, I could only work the loudest of the folks - they could hear me
just fine but I couldn't hear much at all. Changing to different RX antennas
didn't help because in the midst of a strong electrical storm that is within a
mile or two of you with constant lightning overwhelms any RX antenna - and at
one point I shut down and disconnected because I could feel/smell the lightning
- too close! Well, the same was true each night during the contest - lightning
and local storms made the noise level constantly high with constant crashes
that pin the S-meter. 80 was similar. 40 was better. Friday night 40 wasn't
that good for me to Europe or USA, and 80 was poor, 160 was almost
non-existent. Saturday night was much better, and I was able to work some
europeans on 80 finally. On Sunday afternoon I was able to pick up a few quick
European mults on 40 a few hours before sunset that I had missed before. 

Then, as luck would have it, we had a power failure around 1800z on Sunday as I
remember, peak time to the US. It gave me time to recover a bit from the
zombieness of no-sleep, but I think in all reality had we had power straight
through, my score would be relatively unchanged. No biggy.

I noticed a few things this year:

- "Please copy" still prevalent 
- Dupe rates were high (I had 86 dupes I think)
- The cluster effect is kind of a drag, consistency would be much nicer. Are we
becoming dependent on the cluster to find DX now?
- Some of the big M/M's ops need help with listening and TX quality

To expand on the above, the "please copy" thing, while being somewhat
of an irritant, just is. But I think its a symptom of something bigger, that is
that IMHO, we should strive to make QSOs as efficiently as possible, that means
as few extraneous words/transmissions as possible. We're all doing something
like this to some degree, maybe its not "please copy" but it might be
in the phonetics we use (or don't) that require us to retransmit again, or the
extraneous "thank you" versus "thanks", or what is quicker
- "five nine" or "fifty nine"? This leads into my
discussion of rates this year, more below.

I think high dupe rates for me were partly due to the cluster spam that myself
and others experienced. 

As far as the big M/M's, I stopped by and pointed out to one of the big M/M's
20M op that he was 15-20khz wide and that it sounded almost unintelligible. He
cut back on the processing which helped, but I think there more than just an
over-processing issue going on. Not sure what it was but I can't count how many
times I heard callers and had to have them repeat because they were just over
processed to the point of unintelligability.  As a few have pointed out,
perhaps this is becoming an offensive tactic to keep a run frequency and cut
down on frequency neighbors. I also wonder if this was part of why I had such a
difficult time with keeping a run frequency. In the days preceding the contest I
worked with Jim (K9YC) and others to get as close to perfect contest audio as I
could. Looking at TX audio on a scope, and then going for best clarity, punch
and comfort. I got a LOT of "Great audio" comments so I think that's
a good thing, but at the same time I don't think I was wide and therefore folks
creep up right next to me and then push me off (remember, 500w and a tribander
is no match for 1500+w and big monobander stacks). 

I recorded the entire contest so if any of the big M/Ms want to hear what their
station sounded like, I'm happy to provide, just ask. On this topic, if anyone
else recorded the contest, I think it would be really cool to take our
respective QSO recordings to get a feel for what each end sounded like at the
exact same point in time. Hmm…anyone?

The other thing that I noticed is that the big M/M's are often not the best
listeners. When you're "Fresh Meat" on a new band, they are always
the first ones through the pileup, but they are sometimes the last ones to
reply for the exchange. While I would acknowledge that when working simplex,
the pileup gets in the way, but its usually 2 of the big M/M's that have this
issue, while the rest of the pileup is quick to respond and we can all move on.
 

So, now to talk about one of my favorite subjects - Rate. This year, my rate
numbers were not as good as I had hoped - and not as good as last year. Part of
it was just my previously discussed strategic fails, but also I think due to a
number of other things - EU pileup management, cluster effect, etc. Regardless,
here's some numbers:

The best 60 minute rate was 351/hour from 2023 to 2122 (down from 380 last
year)
The best 30 minute rate was 368/hour from 2023 to 2052
The best 10 minute rate was 414/hour from 2025 to 2034

The best 1 minute rates were:
 9 QSOs/minute    3 times.
 8 QSOs/minute   21 times.
 7 QSOs/minute   72 times.
 6 QSOs/minute  143 times.
 5 QSOs/minute  209 times.
 4 QSOs/minute  292 times.
 3 QSOs/minute  301 times.
 2 QSOs/minute  300 times.
 1 QSOs/minute  426 times.

I'll make available (on http://www.n6gq.com) recordings of these high-rate
chunks if anyone cares.

And also, thanks for the 6-banders:

The following stations were worked on 6 bands:

NN3W        K8AZ        NA2U        K3LR        TI5W        PJ4X        
NQ4I        W3LPL       KC1XX       

I had 49 5-banders, mostly I think due to very poor top band conditions. I'm
glad I wasn't the only one though to report the same poor low band conditions.

No plans yet for WW CW. While I much prefer CW contests, my work/family life
has to be the priority for a bit and so I may not do much on the CW front this
year, we'll see…anyone need an op? :)

Thanks for the Q's - this one was memorable!

73 de Jeff, N6GQ, YN2AA


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