[3830] KsQP K0A(@W0BH) Multi-Op LP

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Kansas QSO Party

Call: K0A
Operator(s): W0BH N0QD
Station: W0BH

Class: Multi-Op LP
QTH: 27 KS counties
Operating Time (hrs): 14.9

Summary:
 Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs  Dig Qs
----------------------------
   80:                   
   40:  157      0       
   20:  580    353       
   15:                   
   10:                   
    6:                   
----------------------------
Total:  737    353      0  Mults = 49  Total Score = 142,933

Club: 

Comments:

The 2016 Kansas QSO Party by W0BH as K0A/m

There are two questions that usually wait until the last minute to be answered
in the Kansas QSO Party. Will we be able to field all 45 1x1 calls? And what
route should I take this year?  True to form, question one was answered during
the last week when several new Rookie ops stepped up to cover the last several
1x1 calls. And question two waited for an answer until Thursday (last year it
was Friday) with several last minute routes coming in that really helped the
county situation.

To cover all the calls this year for our KANSAS, SUNFLOWER and QSOPARTY
spelling challenge, XYL Lorna/k0why applied for N0T and Aaron/n0qd who has
driven for me before, applied for N0Q. Then Ron/af5q emailed from Texas with a
broken down car and said he would be unable to put K0P/m on this year, so he
gave me permission to run his call as well. This was turning out to be an
interesting weekend!

As coordinator, I wait until the last minute to put out a route so I can cover
holes in the maps. Our main goal is to have all 105 counties covered both CW
and SSB, preferably by more than one operator.  I also try to have all counties
covered on Saturday and as many as possible on Sunday for our Sunday-Only
operators. Last year we had all the counties scheduled to be covered but came
up one short. John/n6mu missed only that one on Saturday, so I was determined
to not have that happen this year. I also wanted to cover as many NPOTA sites
as I could since 2016 is the year of the National Parks on the Air. 

My Saturday route went north to pick up several NPOTA sites and the only
missing Saturday county. Sunday went west to cover a number of missing (and
sparsely covered) Sunday counties and another NPOTA site. I really wanted to
get to Haskell county which was our only county with just one operator. With
only six hours on Sunday, I decided to put myself in a postion to go there if
necessary (it's almost on the Colorado border), but left it off my planned
route. Luckily, KK6MC did a great job of covering it and saved me lots of
driving. Thanks, Duffey, and thanks to all our other mobiles for similar good
coverage.

Saturday

We had a tremendous amount of rain in the days leading up to the KSQP, but the
weekend was forecast to be relatively dry and the forecast was mostly correct.
Lorna volunteered to drive on Saturday. We were immediately found on 40m by
N6MU and it went from there. My listed frequency was 37 which worked fine on
40m but was occupied by K5KG/m on 20m. George was a surprise visitor from
Florida who just happened to find himself mobile in Kansas during the Kansas
QSO Party and didn't know about our frequency assignments. He's famous for
(among other things) his mobile exploits in the Florida QSO Party as K4KG/m, so
we were honored to have him join us.  I just went to one of the alternate
frequencies and stayed there the rest of the day with no problems.

When we first went to SSB, I started putting out K0P for Ron and let Lorna put
out N0T with a hand mic while she was driving. She was so popular that she
started to worry about safety, so she told me to go ahead and put her call out,
too. She concentrated on driving and didn't miss a turn, but enjoyed listening
to the conversations. Putting out three calls gave me the instant equivalent of
a three-county line. On SSB it wasn't hard to explain and everyone liked
collecting the new letters. On CW, some ops got confused as would be be
expected, so I did less of it on CW. On CW, the easiest was to simply pick a
call and call CQ. I logged everything into one log with a designation of which
call I was using, then split out the logs later. Of course it really cut down
on my personal K0A/m QSO total, but the idea was to get the calls out there so
everyone could find the letters they needed. That worked!

I was so busy operating and logging that I honestly don't remember much of the
run itself. I do remember the stops. Our first NPOTA stop was a the Kansas
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, a very green place this year with all the
rain. As I was finishing up my run, I was visited by W0NXS/Lonnie and K0EMP/Tim
who were running an all day NPOTA operation there at PV15. While we were
talking, K0GPJ/Murl and KE0AKL/Lalana who lived close to the preserve, came
over and joined the conversation. One of my favorite parts of the KSQP is
meeting you all, and this was really special!

The other NPOTA stop was at the Hollenburg Pony Express Station where the
Oregon, California, and Pony Express trails come together. The site has the
actual restored station which was being prepared for a celebratory event on
Sunday (activated by K0ASA). Lorna was able to visit the station while I made
contacts and had a quick lunch.

The trip back to W0BH near Hesston went smoothly, but with an hour to go, my
radio (an IC7000) rebooted.  I was using batteries with a power booster, so my
first thought was power, but I had a solid 13.8 volts to the the radio so that
wasn't it. My next transmissions showed good SWR but reduced power and more
reboots on both CW and and SSB on both radio stacks. Antenna? Radio? Wasn't
sure. By then, we weren't far from home in a county I'd already worked, so
rather than blow a radio, I decided to stop, head home, and check it out. I
took off all the antennas, tightened a few coax connectors, and everything
seemed back to normal. After I cleaned up the van, Ron/ad0dx and his XYL,
Kathy, drove up for their overnight stay. Great fun rehashing the runs over a
good meal. We ended the day with 1277 contacts in the combined log.

Sunday

We were up early Sunday to a beautiful, cool morning. Ron and I spent some time
readying the vehicles, and Aaron/n0qd arrived in time for breakfast. We headed
out a few minutes late with me driving and Aaron putting out N0Q for the first
time. McPherson is a big county, so it was about 45 minutes before we crossed
into Rice county and switched seats. 

I started out on CW and my first call caused the radio to reboot. Uh-ooh. Same
story on SSB. Fresh batteries, so for sure that wasn't the problem. After more
antenna swapping, I decided it was likely the radio or something in the radio
feed which was hard to get to, so I decided to swap out the entire radio system
and antennas. I had a second radio system installed in a milk crate which worked
great multi/multi from 73 counties in the Georgia QSO Party last April, so I
just connected the batteries and antenna and we were good to go. I still
couldn't get the antenna stacks to tune (maybe it's an antenna issue with one
of the stacks), so I put on a single 20m resonator which gave us  full power on
20CW. We had to stop and switch out resonators to get to 20SSB, and for some
reason 40CW didn't tune, but at least we were on the air. The whole process put
us 45 minutes behind schedule and everyone was worried since they couldn't find
us, but we were back!

With Aaron's call, we could now put out four 1x1 calls, so the pileups were
crazy! On Saturday, I made a real effort to always go to 40m for our close-in
gang, so I'm sorry we couldn't do that on Sunday.  We took a bit of a break at
NPOTA site Ft Larned which was also on the Sante Fe trail. I recalculated our
route and found out our radio issue cost us a net of two counties (which had
already been covered by other mobiles). I've been really lucky to not have
radio issues the last number of QSO parties, but it's happened before and it
will happen again. That's mobile contesting!


Stats

We operated 14.9 hours, 793 miles, 2174 combined Qs, 429 unique calls (down
from 493 last year) 22 dupes, one radio.

States not worked ----- : ME VT DE OK AK WY NE ND 

VE not worked ---------- : NS NT NU YT PE NL (same as last year)
KS worked (4 counties) - : CLK POT OTT SAL
DX worked (10 countries) : ON DL HA SP I UA ZF 9A F KP4
NPOTA sites worked (6) - : PV15 TR07 TR14 TR15 NS21 TR11

Combined rate : 146/hr

Six-hour Rates
2016 rates adjusted for 14.9 hours of operating time (combined log)

--------------------- 2016--2015--2014--2013--2012--2011--2010--2009
Saturday 1400-2000 --- 104 - 114 - 109 - 124 - 114 - 129 -- 86 - 145 Qs/hr
Saturday 2000-0200 --- 137 - 108 - 111 - 109 - 124 -- 86 -- 67 - 114 Qs/hr
Sunday   1400-2000 --- 192 - 101 - 127 - 172 - 134 - 106 - 123 - 164 Qs/hr

K0A/m County Breakdown (in visited order)

Saturday (490 miles)
01 MCP 38 McPherson
02 HVY 26 Harvey
03 MRN 28 Marion
04 CHS 55 Chase (includes NPOTA PV15)
05 MOR 44 Morris
06 WAB 23 Wabaunsee
07 GEA 30 Geary
08 RIL 33 Riley
09 MSH 28 Marshall
10 WAS 65 Washington (includes NPOTA TR07/TR14/TR15)
11 REP 35 Republic
12 JEW 46 Jewell
13 SMI 52 Smith
14 OSB 53 Osborne
15 MIT 31 Mitchell
16 CLO 31 Cloud
17 OTT 41 Ottawa
18 SAL 42 Saline
19 LCN 32 Lincoln
20 ELS 26 Elsworth

Sunday (194 miles)
21 RIC 32 Rice
22 BRT 70 Barton
23 RUS 40 Rush
24 PAW 65 Pawnee (includes NPOTA NS21/TR11)
25 EDW 51 Edwards
26 KIO 46 Kiowa
27 PRA 27 Pratt

Special thanks to the following ops for 5 or (way) more contacts:

46 N6MU
37 N8II
19 W1DWA W4UT 
18 VE7CV
17 WA8REI
16 W9FZ
15 K4BYN
14 K0DEQ K7IA W2CVW W7OM
12 K4BAI KJ4LTA KN4Y NO5W WB5JID
11 W2RR W4YWX WA1GZY
10 KE3ZT
09 K0PC VE7JH W7GF
08 AC0CU K5KDG K7PGL KE6FQC
07 K3TW K4ORD KM4FO KS4X NW0M W1END WA4GQG
06 AH6AX DK2OY K3WJV K9NW N2CQ NN6DX W2YC W7GDK WX4G
05 AG6V K0CCM K0TI K5HP K7TQ K8NYG KB7N N4CD N6MDV NU1O VE9AA WC7Q

1x1 stations worked (2) : N0A/m K0T
Other Kansas worked (1) : N0MXI

W0BH Award Winners - First Place - Very Honorable Mention
----------------------------------------------------------
Most overall Qs ---- N6MU/46 ----- N8II/37 ---- W1DWA/N4UT 19
Most CW Qs --------- N6MU/27 ----- N8II/22 ---- W1DWA/19
Most PH Qs --------- N6MU/19 ----- N8II/15 ---- KE3ZT/10
Most counties ------ N6MU/27 ----- N8II/23 ---- W1DWA/19

There are lots of people to thank for the 2016 Kansas QSO party success. The
Santa Fe Trail ARC once again ran KS0KS as our BONUS station and "wild
card" in the spelling competition. We also had two Kansas school stations
(Emporia State and Kansas University) to thank as well as our non-1x1 Kansas
stations. Our mobiles and fixed stations covered all 105 counties. Preliminary
reporting has N6MU with his sixth sweep in a row, and N8II missing only one
county. We also had a number of enthusiastic Kansas Rookies joining us who
represented Kansas well. We hope you all return next year!
 
Special thanks to our out-of-state mobiles Ron/ad0dx, Jon/w0zq, Jerry/k5yaa,
Bill/nu0q, Alan/n5na, Mark/ki0i, Connie/k5mc and Pam/n5kw, Duffey/kk6mc,
George/K5KG and Victor/WB0TEV for visiting our state (and Ron/af5q for trying
to!). That gave us fifteen mobiles this year, or 19 mobile callsigns if you
count all the extra 1x1 calls put out by the mobiles. Ron/ad0dx put out N0N/m
for Nate/N0NB.  THANK YOU THANK YOU to all. Thanks to those of you who spotted
the mobiles on the traditional spotting networks. Those spots, and our
customized spotting network link, once again set up by Richard/k0rcj and
Kent/kb0rwi, allowed a number of you to find that last letter needed to spell
KANSAS, SUNFLOWER, or QSOPARTY and grab an antique amateur stamp or three for
your certificate. Thanks to Bruce/ki5te for his continuing help with the
stamps.

This year, our sponsors (see the KSQP Sponsors link on the KSQP web site) came
through once again to provide the funding for our operations. If you win a
plaque, be sure to thank your plaque sponsor, and thank our corporate sponsors
with a shopping visit if you get  the chance. Thanks in advance to Ron/ad0dx
for his help in log-checking. Thanks to Lorna and Aaron for safely negotiating
the Kansas roads for me. And finally, thanks Kent/kb0rwi, for your great job on
the KSQP web site. It's a busy time for you with all the incoming logs.

We also want to thank the Ohio and Hawaii QSO Parties for sharing the weekend
with us. It was fun putting OH in the log and it was really nice to have
matching exchanges. The Ohio stations for the most part respected our mobile
window, and I gave instructions to our Kansas CW ops to stay low and out of the
listed Ohio QSO Party frequencies. We personally put only one HI contact in the
log, and it wasn't even for my own K0A/m call! DX conditions both west and east
just weren't great again this year, but thanks to the DX who did make it
through.
                                                                           
As before, the best part of this was getting to meet or exchange emails with
many of you as we all tried to make this work. With your help, we did. Keep in
touch. Any suggestions for the 2017 Kansas QSO Party (our ninth), or comments
about this one are always welcome ... !

73, Bob/w0bh/k0a with Lorna/k0why/n0t and Aaron/n0qd/n0q
2016 KSQP Coordinator


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