[3830] ARRLDX CW HH2AA(W2GD) SO Unlimited LP
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Fri Mar 9 01:21:16 EST 2018
ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: HH2AA
Operator(s): W2GD
Station: HH2AA
Class: SO Unlimited LP
QTH: Haiti
Operating Time (hrs): 23
Remote Operation
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 1 1
80: 283 46
40: 351 50
20: 1066 58
15: 760 47
10: 0 0
-------------------
Total: 2461 202 Total Score = 1,487,124
Club: Frankford Radio Club
Comments:
Even after almost six decades of contesting, there is always something new to
try. My first attempt at remote operation turned out to an amazing and unique
adventure. My tale is rather long - there were so many twists and turns.
First a few words about HH2AA, a station that has been on the Remote Ham Radio
(RHR) network for a few years. This is a proof of concept project supported by
RHR in cooperation with the Radio Club of Haiti. All proceeds
from station rentals are returned to the people of Haiti through the Haiti Air
Ambulance Service organization - https://www.haitiairambulance.org/. The
station is a test platform used to try out off shore construction and operation
techniques. It is located on a mountain at 6,300 feet ASL near Port-au-Prince
Haiti, solar powered, and remotely controlled using proprietary RHR software.
Station assets include an Elecraft K3 running up to 100w, a Cushcraft A3
tribander fixed NW (USA/JA), a Cushcraft A4 fixed NE (EU), and a 160M OCF wire
antenna.
All antennas are mounted on a Rohn 45G 80 foot tower. A rotatable mulit-band
antenna is planned in coming months. There is fiberoptic internet service to
the site. All HH2AA contacts are uploaded to LOTW almost immediately and QSL
cards can requested from NR6M. The grid square is FK38uk. Pictures and
additional
information about the station can be found at these URLs:
https://www.qrz.com/db/hh2aa and
http://www.remotehamradio.com/2017/04/hh2aa-is-back/ and
http://www.remotehamradio.com/2017/12/hh2aa/
I sincerely thank the owners of RHR for providing this unique opportunity to
test drive HH2AA as a remote entry in the 2018 ARRL DX Phone contest. The
original plan was to set the station up at the site of my own future 'remote' at
KU2C/3 in Finland, PA. As you will read below being able to adapt to changing
circumstances can be a big part of this game we call contesting.
Timeline of Events Leading Up to Operating HH2AA:
Tuesday 2/27 Received the green light from RHR to use HH2AA during the ARRLDX
Phone Contest.
Wednesday 2/28 Determined my 15 year old Dell laptop lacks the necessary
horsepower to handle the task.
Saturday 3/2 KU2C comes up with a more powerful laptop and extra monitor.
Tuesday 3/5 Lee, WW2DX at RHR and Pete, KU2C run proof of concept tests -
everything works!
Thursday 3/7 Set station up at KU2C's QTH using my K3S. Test several
microphones. Dial in the VOX settings. Integrate Win-Test.
Everything is ready to go! My K3S and Win-Test control the K3
at HH2AA perfectly. Make 100 contacts to get the feel for remote
operation. Leave KU2C that evening feeling totally upbeat.
Friday 3/8 10:30 a.m. Impact of a predicted major coastal storm begins
to be felt at mid-morning. Snow and high winds start to make
travel by automobile difficult.
Friday 3/8 11:59 a.m. KU2C sends a text to tell me he's lost commercial
power due to downed trees. Estimated time to repair unknown
(repairs were finally be made late Sunday afternoon).
Concurrently, while on the FRC Slack Chat Channel, developed
a Plan B - I'll travel the 37 miles to KU2C, pick up station,
and relocate to K3WW who has power and internet.
Friday 3/8 2:30 p.m. Set off on the trek to KU2C/3 allowing several extra
hours for potential travel difficulties. My projected ETA is
4:30 or 5 p.m.
Friday 3/8 5:35 p.m. Lee at RHR calls to tell me connectivity to HH2AA has
been lost. It is a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) problem
on Haiti. Tech will visit site in the morning. We discuss
possible operation using another RHR site within FRC club
territory until fate of HH2AA is known.
Friday 3/8 6:30 p.m. Have now been on the road for four hours and advanced
just 25 miles. Have seen over a dozen cars and school buses that
have slid off the road, snapped utility poles, down power
lines, uprooted trees, experienced blizzard whiteout conditions,
and most importantly have yet to find a plowed or treated road.
Traffic is at a total standstill in the area of Perkesie, PA.
Friday 3/8 6:40 to 7:10 p.m. Take refuge at a restaurant and have dinner.
Nothing is going well.
Friday 3/8 7:15 p.m. Back on the road. Finally find a way to get beyond a
major hill that has prevented me from reaching KU2C, only to be
detoured again twice by downed trees and wires.
Friday 3/8 9:30 p.m. After seven hours finally reach KU2C in Finland, PA.
We load the station into my car and I set off for K3WW.
Immediately encounter another blocked road - tree down.
Will this horror show ever end?
Friday 3/8 10:25 p.m. Reach K3WW. Driveway unplowed and blocked by nearly
three feet of piled up snow. Call RHR. All NY stations are now
off the network due to storm related problems (no power,
no internet, etc.) Decide to drive home to NJ. You just can't
fight mother nature.
Friday 3/8 11:55 p.m. Arrive home after over 9+ hours of travel. Road
conditions magically improved as I crossed the bridge from PA
into NJ. Contemplate what to do in the morning.
Saturday 3/9 9:00 a.m. Talk to Lee at RHR. Technician has been dispatched
by ISP to diagnose problem. ETA on-site is unknown. No
guarantee
internet service will be restored. Consider going to the W2CG
M2.
Set the station up (laptop and K3) on the dining room table
"just
in case" connectivity is restored.
Saturday 3/9 2:00 p.m. Lee calls from RHR. HH2AA is back up on the network.
EUREKA! We run through the setup procedure and quickly discover
the ISP technician had mistakenly reset a critical
on-site RHR router that was configured to provide external rig
control and logging program support. No way to resolve
this problem until Monday.
Saturday 3/9 2:20 p.m. The only option left - use the basic RHR functionality
regularly available on their station control page which provides
antenna selection, band and mode selection, PTT, basic frequency
control and rx tuning, output power monitor, a beta version
voice
keyer, and a basic logging program.
Saturday 3/9 2:22 p.m. I weight my options and immediately decide I'll go
forward with the cards dealt. Being DX is far more fun than
being a W2.
Saturday 3/9 2:29 p.m. Begin operation on 21.420. Call CQ just once. Instant
pileup - the power of being a new multiplier is immediately
demonstrated.
The Operating Experience
Starting a contest nearly 20 hours late dictates some mental adjustment and
recalculation of goals. I'd missed the entire first night (80 and 40 meter
prime time) and most of the best running hours on 15M the first day. Came to
the conclusion the best score I could hope for would be achieved by simply
running on the band with the best rate and not worrying at all about multipliers
(hoping they would find me). Besides, without contest logging software I was
operating "blind" with no idea of what multipliers were needed on a
band or how many contacts I might have on any band at any point in time. No
contest software also meant no access to Super Check Partial to confirm call
signs. At least I wouldn't be hand logging. :-)
It took a few hours to get comfortable operating without what over the years
have become basic tools. I was probably bothered most by not having VOX. Have
never been a foot switch guy and having to manually press the CTRL button on the
keyboard for every transmission took some adjustment. The other thing I probably
missed most was not being able to move between log entry fields by pressing the
space bar key ... something I've done for over forty years using CT, NA,
Win-Test and other loggers. It took several hours to automatically press the
'Tab' key after entering a call ... but it took concentration! Later on into
the contest having to enter report data for EVERY contact (no report pre-fills
after working a station on another band) became rather tedious.
Being the only station active from Haiti certainly attracted a crowd. It's
probably been a decade or more since I've had Aruba all to myself in a major
contest. I knew what to expect and was prepared for the massive initial
response. This was one of the reasons I decided to proceed with the operation
even with a somewhat limited tool set... I'm a rate junkie at heart and the
prospect of big pileups was terribly appealing!
Needless to say I was not disappointed. The first five hours on 20M Saturday
afternoon were consistent 150 hours ... the adrenaline rush was spectacular.
Then as I transitioned to 40M and then 80M the pileups continued to be
impressive considering I'm running just 100 watts to a 160M OCF wire through an
auto tuner.
It was heaven!
The only serious shortcoming of the station is the noise from the solar inverter
system which covers 160 meters with S9+20 garbage. The RHR guys think they have
a fix but it will have to wait until their next visit. On CW this racket is
less disruptive using narrow filtering. Only K3WW made it through on Top Band
in a 'move' QSO from 80M. I tuned a few times, thought I heard K3LR and W3LPL
CQing, but never well enough to attempt a QSO.
The Sunday morning sunrise run on 80 and then 40 was better than I had expected
but then the morning doldrums set in. Both 20 and 15 opened to EU from the US
which forced those of us to the south to take a back seat. The rate dropped
like
= a rock - 20 an hour was the norm until about 1800 when the floodgates opened
on 15M, yielding an exciting 177 hour - my best of the contest.
I set up a cluster window on a 2nd laptop during the slow period Sunday morning
and watched ten meter call outs all day. Never saw a single spot for the HI8 or
KP4 guys so had low expectations for an opening but kept trying some CQs from
time to time each hour. There simply was never propagation from HH to the US -
disappointing to say the least.
So what about the internet latency issue? To tell you the truth it was rarely
noticeable. At times the internet would burp or my laptop would become over
burdened and slow down, but this never stopped me from making contacts.
Sometimes I'd simply hit a key that I shouldn't have on the computer and I'd end
up disconnected and have to restart. But in general, I found remote operation
very easy and not all that different than the real thing. Using PTT, I had to
be somewhat careful not to let up on the CTRL button too soon, otherwise the
final "A" in HH2AA would get cut off (suspect if I had VOX working
this would have been a non-issue). No one complained that my audio was
unintelligible at any point. And probably most important of all I felt LOUD most
of the time. The HH2AA location is a killer.
Post Contest
When the bell rang at 2359 UTC I had absolutely no idea how I'd done in my 23
hours of on time. The RHR logger doesn't have a contact counter so the total
number of QSOs logged was unknown. Monday morning Lee at RHR sent me a file of
ADIF contact records. It was apparent there were almost 2,500 contacts but some
work was needed to create a log in valid Cabrillo format. During the contest
I'd mistakenly entered report data in the wrong log entry field for about 400
contacts near the start, and without an edit check, throughout the weekend at
least 50 section abbreviations were entered wrong but still accepted. These are
minor things really, but time consuming to fix manually. I used a freeware
converter to migrate from ADIF to Cabrillo format records. Fellow FRCer KE2D
helped me correct some record format errors. Finally by late Monday evening,
early Tuesday
morning, I finally had a log I could load on Win-Test and obtain statistics. As
expected 20M was my big band but I was impressed by the 40 meter multiplier
given the limited time spent on the band. I can't help but wonder what the score
would have been if the original setup that worked so well Thursday afternoon had
been in play.
Below are some additional statistics provided by K8IA using the CBS log
analyzer. Thanks Bob!
Bottom line, to me the HH2AA remote operation was an unqualified success even
with the 19 hour delayed start and lacking the nice to have accessories. I'd
love to do it again. Thanks RHR for the opportunity and your first class
support every step of the way!
73,
John, W2GD aka P40W/P44W
Cabrillo Statistics (Version 10g) by K5KA & N6TV
CONTEST: ARRL-DX-SSB
CALLSIGN: HH2AA
CATEGORY-OPERATOR: SINGLE-OP
CATEGORY-TRANSMITTER: ONE
OPERATORS: W2GD
-------------- Q S O R a t e S u m m a r y ---------------------
Hour 160 80 40 20 15 10 Rate Total Pct
--------------------------------------------------------------------
0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0300 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0400 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0500 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0600 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0700 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0800 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1300 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1400 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1500 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1600 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1700 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1800 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
1900 0 0 0 0 79 0 79 79 3.2
2000 0 0 0 0 49 0 49 128 5.2
2100 0 0 0 166 1 0 167 295 12.0
2200 0 0 0 134 0 0 134 429 17.4
2300 0 0 0 155 0 0 155 584 23.7
0000 0 0 0 158 0 0 158 742 30.2
0100 0 0 0 149 0 0 149 891 36.2
0200 0 0 123 15 0 0 138 1029 41.8
0300 0 13 80 0 0 0 93 1122 45.6
0400 1 106 0 0 0 0 107 1229 49.9
0500 0 43 0 0 0 0 43 1272 51.7
0600 0 61 0 0 0 0 61 1333 54.2
0700 0 8 48 0 0 0 56 1389 56.4
0800 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1390 56.5
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1390 56.5
1000 0 5 0 0 0 0 5 1395 56.7
1100 0 46 68 0 0 0 114 1509 61.3
1200 0 0 32 9 0 0 41 1550 63.0
1300 0 0 0 55 0 0 55 1605 65.2
1400 0 0 0 23 0 0 23 1628 66.2
1500 0 0 0 20 0 0 20 1648 67.0
1600 0 0 0 16 0 0 16 1664 67.6
1700 0 0 0 44 7 0 51 1715 69.7
1800 0 0 0 0 177 0 177 1892 76.9
1900 0 0 0 0 108 0 108 2000 81.3
2000 0 0 0 0 160 0 160 2160 87.8
2100 0 0 0 0 119 0 119 2279 92.6
2200 0 0 0 55 60 0 115 2394 97.3
2300 0 0 0 67 0 0 67 2461 100.0
------------------------------------------------------
Total 1 283 351 1066 760 0 2461
Gross QSOs=2475 Dupes=14 Net QSOs=2461
Unique callsigns worked = 1663
The best 60 minute rate was 180/hour from 2109 to 2208
The best 30 minute rate was 196/hour from 1807 to 1836
The best 10 minute rate was 210/hour from 1811 to 1820
The best 1 minute rates were:
6 QSOs/minute 1 times.
5 QSOs/minute 4 times.
4 QSOs/minute 116 times.
3 QSOs/minute 371 times.
2 QSOs/minute 287 times.
1 QSOs/minute 284 times.
There were 13 bandchanges
Multi-band QSOs
---------------
1 bands 1158
2 bands 302
3 bands 114
4 bands 88
5 bands 1
6 bands 0
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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