[3830] RTTY WPX WD6T SOAB TB-Wires HP

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                    CQ WPX RTTY Contest - 2022

Call: WD6T
Operator(s): WD6T
Station: WD6T

Class: SOAB HP
Class Overlay: TB-Wires 
QTH: Berkeley, CA
Operating Time (hrs): 20:50

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
   80:  101
   40:  169
   20:  152
   15:  251
   10:   75
------------
Total:  748  Prefixes = 317  Total Score = 452,676

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Comments:

I wasn't able to do a serious effort, so I decided to get on the air from my
terrain-challenged small home station. I figured if it was too frustrating, I'd
just bail.  I was pleasantly surprised by the results, and got sucked into the
fun.  I ended up with 21 hours BIC and more Qs than I've ever made before from
home in a RTTY contest.   

S&P proved more productive than running, though I did have some good runs
when propagation favored me.  Strictly SO1R, I cycled between the active bands,
doing frequent sweeps of the pan-adapter.  The best band by far was 15 meters. 
It was much quieter than 20m, with stronger signals, and great JA/Asia runs. 
Still, 20m had its moments (to the US only) and 40m had good domestic runs as
well.  I tried hard to work at least 100 Qs on every band, but couldn't manage
it on 10m, and had to struggle to achieve it on 80m.

Asia was great on 15 meters (I have a downslope in that direction), with
extended runs, but poor on 20 meters. I also worked a loud JA on 40 meters, at
8:30 AM local, an hour and a half after California sunrise.  Great to see South
America out in force on 15m and 10m, but very few European/African stations were
audible here; I worked only CR3, EA8, D4, GW (a pleasant surprise on 15m), and a
couple of ESP contacts with continental Europe.  (I have an up-slope to EU and
the continental U.S.)

There were two significant technical problems:  First, when I'd click on a spot
in N1MM, it would reset the RTTY mark and space frequencies to garbage values,
requiring me to reset them to make decoding work again. This was so tedious that
I ended up exclusively using the tuning knob.  Even more concerning, five times
during transmission, the IC-7610 seemed to go through a partial power reset,
returning to the boot-up splash screen for a few seconds. This then required a
restart of the logger. I have never seen this problem before and will have to
delve into it further. 

All in all, a fun contest, and glad to see what my QTH could achieve and
contribute some points to NCCC.


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