[3830] IARU WA4PSC SOABCW LP

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                    IARU HF World Championship

Call: WA4PSC
Operator(s): WA4PSC
Station: WA4PSC

Class: SOABCW LP
QTH: Chapel Hill, NC
Operating Time (hrs): 22:53

Summary:
 Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs  Zones  HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
  160:   27             5       1
   80:   89             9       4
   40:  255            18      24
   20:  484            24      27
   15:   96            14      23
   10:   15             5       4
-------------------------------------
Total:  966     0      75      83  Total Score = 521,400

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

First IARU run from low-fi home QTH.  Main lesson: running contests at HP Super
Stations has spoiled me, and it is humbling running LP with a dipole. 
Propagation indices looked pretty marginal, and sure enough, the condx were not
great, but the game must go on!

A surprisingly good amount of runs, but with good mults I also spent a lot of
time repeating my call ad infintum.  My thanks to those many hams who were so
patient and attempted to repeatedly extract my call from the noise, you guys
are fantastic, and any success I have I share with you!

Disappointing zone total of 75, and only worked 3 zones on all 6 bands.

It was great hearing PVRC buddies on (almost) all bands, makes the contest feel
like a neighborhood event!  I even worked some of you guys on multiple bands
which was fun!

I probably got 90% of my Qs in the first 18hrs or so, and could have gone to
bed much earlier, but you never know...

Bands:
10M never really opened, prop was fluttery and erratic when it was open.
15M held promise and seemed open at times, but never populated as I hoped.
20M was weak at the start, but really picked up a few hours in.
40M was (as expected) noisy, Beverages really helped pull the Qs.
80M had few people, and was relatively noisy even with Beverages.
160M was, well, we know 160 in the summer...S9 atmosphere even on Beverages

Equipment: 
Elecraft K-line; worked flawlessly and the P3 was indispensable in non-assisted
class
238' OCF Carolina Windom dipole
Orthogonal pair crossed K9SV Beverage RX ant
N1MM logger

Equipment failures: 
As the contest started N1MM+ disconnected from the logger bridge so I punted
back to old N1MM which worked flawlessly the whole contest, lost some time
there. 
I guess I slouched later in the evening, and managed to hook my foot into the
mouse cable, unplugging it.  Didn't realize it until I had to grab for it to
edit a call and...nothing happened...PANIC!  My apologies to whomever I was
taking to at that point.
Effectively my Aeron chair failed in that it was less than comfortable 12hrs in
giving me a pain in the butt.  I spent a good amount of time standing and
jumping to keep the blood flowing.

Best runs:  
Highest peak rate I saw was not record-setting at 215/hr.  LP/ant limitation.
1m: 180/hr
10m: 126/hr
60m 103/hr

Thanks for all the Qs and good operating practices, looking forward to the next
contest and hopefully some antenna upgrades here!

Cheers & 73,
Howie - WA4PSC


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