[3830] NAQP RTTY KN5S(K5WW) Single Op LP

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North American QSO Party, RTTY - February

Call: KN5S
Operator(s): K5WW
Station: KN5S

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): 4

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   80:    9     8
   40:    6     6
   20:   45    15
   15:  154    32
   10:    0     0
-------------------
Total:  214    61  Total Score = 13,054

Club: 

Team: 

Comments:

Got started two hours late because of road construction (a 1 hour detour,
welcome to this part of the world!) and unexpected PC issues (thanks to Windows
update changing settings behind my back).

Despite a total time of about 30 minutes of CQ (at various times) I never
managed to log a single QSO on 10. 15 was very productive, with rates of 180/hr
for the first hour. Then it slowed down cosiderably.

And then... I got visited by a crew from the local electric coop. They finally
decided to come and have a look at the issue with the horribly noisy
transformers, a quarter mile down the road, that we reported two months ago.
Totally unexpected; it being a Saturday!

Those faulty transformers have been ruining our receive and fun for half a year
now; so I was more than happy to drop out of the race and show those reps what
we have been fighting for months!

The end result is that they and I spent many hours in a small alley, which is
stuffed with overloaded and defective transformers. After a few hours, with
them listening to the issues with portable radios and ultrasound they
acknowledged the problem, even powering down and (temporarily) removing
hardware on the pole, and they were able to verify the dramatic decrease in
noise in the shack. Come Monday they are going to start replacing hardware, now
that they no longer have a way of denying the issues.

The crew left a little after dark, at which time they had put back all of their
junky hardware and turned the power back on. And the noise returned, with a
vengeance, to an even higher level. I tried milking 20, 40 and 80 for a while;
but it was virtually impossible. So I just gave up.

My apologies for the many repeat requests, for the past couple of months.
Dealing with S9+ transformer noise on most HF bands is a pain...

But despite all the issues it was still fun. See you all after the guys are
done fixing!


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