[3830] CQ160 CW NN7CW Single Op Assisted HP

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                    CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW - 2021

Call: NN7CW
Operator(s): NN7CW
Station: NN7CW

Class: Single Op Assisted HP
QTH: NFL
Operating Time (hrs): 26:22

Summary:
Total:  QSOs = 1157  State/Prov = 59  Countries = 43  Total Score = 356,388

Club: Florida Contest Group

Comments:

My CQ 160m 2021 contest experience, or: The Good, the Band and the Ugly
The Good: higher QSO count than last year, by about 200 or so. Had fun while the
Sa morning grayline hit the EU.
The Bad: less multipliers, EU not heard other than during grayline. No exciting
DX heard at all. In fact, I felt that I wasn't hearing well most of the time.
Lots of unfinished QSOs I ended up not logging, because I wasn't able to hear
the full exchange and then the guy was just gone. Got home from work later than
planned, was in a bad mood and my motivation was mediocre at best. Couldn't make
myself doing any S&P on the second RX while running, despite the runs being
slow most of the time. Did a lot of news reading and other useless stuff on the
internet instead.
The Ugly, #1: the transmit signal of my K3S. After receiving two valid
complaints after the 10m contest and lots of testing using another K3 with a P3
for visualization, I was under the false impression that the problem should be
less intense on 160m. Took a bunch of measurements on Monday after CQ160, using
my brand-new oscilloscope I bought for that purpose and found that the rig
produces a nasty, leading spike before the following cw code element, so no
wonder it sounds like an old Yaesu. I'm currently working with Elecraft to get
this fixed. #2: my bad temper: I was trying to check the TX delay setting in the
config menu while running - bad idea! Turns out that you can confuse the rig
when entering/leaving/navigating the config menu while transmitting in between,
which I wasn't aware of. All of a sudden, a neighbor station appeared on my run
QRG and started CQing in my face. S9+40dB on my TX antenna. Tried to ask him
multiple times what the heck he was doing, but he just kept going. Got angry and
sent a nasty email, just to find out moments later that the frequency the
display showed was not corresponding with where I was actually receiving.
Restarted the rig and the guy was gone. Found him running a couple of kHz below
my QRG - great! :( Repeated the procedure (after turning the power down to zero)
and got the rig stuck in transmit, so indeed, you cannot mess with the config
while operating. Spent 5 minutes testing, 15 minutes writing an apology and felt
pretty terrible for the rest of the contest. Maybe I should have skipped this
one and watched a good spaghetti western instead. Any recommendations?

73, Wolf, NN7CW


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