[3830] CQ WW RTTY ZF1A(W9KKN) SOAB HP

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                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY - 2020

Call: ZF1A
Operator(s): W9KKN
Station: ZF1A

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Grand Cayman
Operating Time (hrs): 44.2
Radios: SO2R
Remote Operation

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  State/Prov  DX   Zones
------------------------------------
   80:  370       48      36    12
   40: 1213       54      68    23
   20: 1270       57      61    21
   15:  512       50      37    18
   10:   14        1       6     5
------------------------------------
Total: 3379      210     208    79  Total Score = 3,931,767

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Comments:

First off, I'd like to thank a bunch of people for making this possible:
ZF1EJ - for putting up with Marty and I in trying to make remote a possibility
here, as well as looking after the station before and during the weekend
NN1C - For all of his brilliant effort that he put into this and the support and
encouragement all weekend
N6MJ and N6WIN - For all of the encouragement and operating advice throughout
this process, as well as the opportunity to be part of the ZF1A team
K7ZO - For stepping up to be our new QSL manager @ ZF1A, filling the shoes of
K6AM (who I should mention has contributed so much to this station over the
years)

This was a rare opportunity in 2pt land where due to the COVID situation we knew
we'd be a bit more rare than normal. We didn't broadcast our plans and kept it
low key (well, except for the occasional appearance in CWTs/CWO, sprints, and
WAE) but as a team, we've invested a lot into this station over the last year
and letting it sit idle for this contest season seemed less than desirable. 

The remote part of this was less than a full experiment in many ways because
I've been remotely operating NW6P and N6RO for years at this point and in the
age of COVID, remote contesting is almost becoming a known entity. Attempting a
competitive full-scale remote DX SO2R/2BSIQ effort was the new part. In all
honesty, being there is much better but I think it went pretty well and I'm
still trying to process it all as I catch back up on sleep. I'm not going to go
into the technical details behind all of this here (or I'll never finish the
posting), but maybe at Dayton when we get that going again I'll put a talk
together. I did have a few early issues with the macros related to timing, so I
apologize if you ended up calling me again when you weren't sure that I had sent
"TU", which was getting cut off sometimes. I also had a few issues
where all of my decoding windows were bogging down computer I was using to the
point where the logger would occasionally become unresponsive for multiple
seconds and ruin a QSO.

I tried to set up my sleep schedule so that I would wake up toward the start of
the contest, but unfortunately, work interfered a bit with that and it didn't
quite go as planned. I started the contest off a bit groggy and made it only
45-ish hours awake (one hour subtracted turned out to be a surprising local
equipment failure.) I'm pretty sure that I can do a full 48 with a bit more
preparation and training, but I can definitely feel the difference that recent
diet/exercise has made here. 

How did the bands do? Well, the Kp was between 3 and 5 all weekend so as good as
they could have done. I tried several times to get stations on 10m and mostly
only worked South America, though I think it was a lot more open than anyone
thought throughout the southeast region. As is normally the case, we were pretty
loud on 80m, but unfortunately didn't have the ability to turn the antenna
beyond W1/EU. In addition, an issue with the feed line of the 80m beam scared us
a bit into thinking it wasn't going to make it through the contest, but the
threat of deploying a dipole was enough to scare Murphy off.

Anyway, thanks for all of the Q's everyone!

--Bill/W9KKN/ZF2WF @ ZF1A


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