[3830] TBDC K2AV Single Op HP

[webform at b4h.net]

                    Stew Perry Topband Challenge - Spring

Call: K2AV
Operator(s): K2AV
Station: K2AV

Class: Single Op HP
QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs): 3.7

Summary:
Total:  QSOs = 139  Total Score = 337

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

Wow.

My typical non-24 sleep rhythm way off this week, but was planning a most of the
day hard nap putting me fresh on the rig at 4-5 pm EST. Family emergency
overruled, good outcome, but at contest time had been up for 22 hours straight.
Got on anyway, and making decent rate for March session, when the PC gave up the
ghost, trying to make Windows 10 upgrade in the background I think, with
messages about phoning home to mama to tell why the install croaked. 

When the PC came back up and I restarted N1MM, it had corrupted the logger.ini
file and all my settings were gone. Not in an alert and comprehending state due
to the aforementioned, had a hard time locating the backup file to get things
back. But finally did. By this time I was having a hard time focusing my eyes on
the monitor, but got back in there anyway. At some point I fell asleep and woke
up with my head resting on the K3. I'm lucky I didn't land on a key, sending
something endlessly for however long that was.  

I correctly interpreted that event as a clue, gave up and went to bed, thinking
I would wake up before dawn and get up to glean some score from early risers,
which did happen.

Just before and into darkness, was working weak stations up and down east coast
on a very quiet band, which disappeared when the gray line got to Louisiana. At
that point the QRN jumped up four S units in honor of a huge extremely active
thunderstorm cell over northern Louisiana, southern Arkansas. It sat there for
the entire night, according to the excellent blitzortung.org lightning data, and
when dawn broke it moved to southeast Louisanna. The good people of northern
Louisanna must have felt like they were being bombed all night. 

So the noise was still there when I got up from my mid-contest sleep. I
remembered something from my teenage days on 80m summertime traffic nets, about
turning off the AGC and letting the headphones hang around my neck, which helped
with the copy in the QRN quite a bit. 

Anyhow, not a stellar contest for me. My abject apologies to those folks who I
just could not dig out of Louisiana Lightning. 

I haven't been able to install my SAL-30 RX antenna yet (another story best not
told), but it would not have helped listening west since Louisiana right in any
lobe that favored the west coast. Would have helped with NE. 

Unlike N3HEE, I heard no EU. Worked KV4FZ and PJ2T for DX and some west coast 8
pointers. But my biggest problem was falling asleep on top of the rig, not
conditions or Louisiana Lightning. 

Station: K3 + Alpha 8410, Inverted L over FCP, SAL-30 still in the box.


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