[3830] NAQP CW NC4KW(@N1LN) M/2 LP

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                    North American QSO Party, CW - January

Call: NC4KW
Operator(s): AA4FU N4YDU W0UCE N1LN
Station: N1LN

Class: M/2 LP
QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs): 12

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:  194    42
   80:  424    57
   40:  431    58
   20:  330    60
   15:  214    51
   10:  134    38
-------------------
Total: 1727   306  Total Score = 528,462

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Team: 

Comments:

As with every NAQP-CW outing the team was really looking forward to another fun
time.  There were a couple of potential factors that could take away some of
the fun like the lingering impact of the high solar activity during the
previous week and the unknown impact of the heavy storms moving through the
area during the first half of the contest.  But when the starting gun went off
at 1800 UTC off we went.

Yup, Jack and Nate were off on 10 and 15. Alan and I were off watching the
weather channel, and numerous weather radar displays for what was soon to
arrive.  In about 1 hour, by 1900 UTC, the sky went black, the wind started to
kick up and the rain came down harder.  We were under a tornado warning, severe
thunderstorm warning and a high wind warning.  Jack and Nate kept going.  Alan
and I kept watching.  We got lucky again!  By 1930, only 30 minutes duration,
the storm blew through and it was over.  No thunder or lightening, no tornado,
and according to our weather station, the wind hit about 42 mph and the max
rain rate was just under 11 inches per hour.  We never had to shut down and
none of the antennas were impacted.  But, having dodged that bullet there were
others just around the corner.

The biggest headache of the contest was the recurring loss of network
connectivity between the two stations. It happened 4 times and in 2 of the
cases the computers had to be rebooted. The other two only took stop / starts
of N1MM.  In all cases resyncs were necessary.  We still don't have any idea
what caused the network issues, but during the testing we were always able to
ping all the network devices, files could be sent back and forth between the
ham shack computers, and the print server on another networked computer worked
fine from one of the ham shack computers.  Connectivity would come back and be
fine for anywhere from 1 hour to 4 hours.  Total lost time was in the area of
45 minutes.

Then around 2400 UTC we lost the Skimmer Cluster.  We use the VE7CC software
and were connected to the AE5E telnet node.  So a quick reconfigure to select a
different node and off we went.  Well, almost.  Had to revisit the configuration
settings once more to enable SKIMMER spots.  Lost time was only about 10
minutes. Unless I am doing something wrong, which is quite possible, AE5E is
still down today.

So at this point our total lost time was almost 1 hour and that is too much to
lose in a 12 hour contest.

Fortunately everything else went well.  From out QTH the low bands were much
better than the high bands as our Q and Mult count show.  The storms did leave
some artifacts around in the form of high QRN and S9+ static crashes, but we
continued to push on.

When the closing bell sounded, much to our surprise, we exceeded last years Q
count, mult count and of course total points.  

Thanks to Jack (W0UCE), Nate (N4YDU) and Alan (AA4FU) for making this another
successful M2 outing.  Also thanks to everyone that called us for the Qs and
for the patience, especially on 80 and 160, while we asked again and again for
repeats.  

Next week I will be on as a Single Op in NAQP-SSB. 

Until then, 73 -

Bruce - N1LN


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