[3830] NAQP CW W9KKN(@NW6P) Single Op LP

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                    North American QSO Party, CW - August

Call: W9KKN
Operator(s): W9KKN
Station: NW6P

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: Cupertino, CA
Operating Time (hrs): 10
Remote Operation

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:    0     0
   80:   52    13
   40:  150    42
   20:  270    47
   15:   46    18
   10:    3     2
-------------------
Total:  521   122  Total Score = 63,562

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Team: NCCC Team #2

Comments:

As always, special thanks to Tom (NW6P) for letting me use his station. The
remodel is coming along nicely with just a few shack projects remaining. 

Unfortunately, I wasn't physically present to enjoy it this time, and this was
my first attempt at an entirely remote contest using FlexRadio SmartLink. I had
known that I would be out visiting family in Illinois / Florida ahead of the
contest and had arranged to do things such as turn the rotor (which I didn't
quite finish) and turn the radio on and off remotely.

Usually, with SmartLink, you don't get a local sidetone for the CW generated by
the emulated WinKeyer, but luckily I still have a Maestro and a real hardware
WinKeyer, which worked well. The latency (at 280ms or so), was still a bit much
for the whole system to keep up with, and on both the local and remote internet
connections, I was fighting Netflix/large downloads for bandwidth. Occasionally
the packet loss / queuing delay would cause a drop at a very inopportune time,
in some cases several, and in the worst case, it would start exposing race
conditions/linearization bugs in the software that would make it outright crash
(happened at least twice.) Sometimes I could turn down the waterfall/FFT update
rate, and that would help, but only to a point.

My CW still has some seriously rough edges, but it's coming along. I open
MorseRunner for at least 10 minutes every day, but NAQP CW is not your usual 5NN
NR format, so it's a bit trickier to practice for other than in the weekly
sprints and such. I'd say the repeats went down from 3-5 times per QSO to 0-2 or
so, which is progress, but still lots of QLFs. The main problem was between the
key and chair. :) Remote latency/loss probably didn't help but wasn't nearly the
factor I thought it would be.

I got one or two states nearby on 10 meters and a bit of activity on 15, but
20/40 were where everything was. There's still some wideband local noise nearby
Tom's that seems to wreck 20m on the half hour (or so) and then disappear. I
used to think it was his pool pump, but turning that off last time didn't help.
When I have some spare time (hihi), I'll have to track it down.

The most important part of the contest is to have fun, and that I did. 

73 & Thanks for the Q's (and extra patience), everyone!
-- Bill/W9KKN


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