[3830] ARRL Dig K6LL SO1R-8 LP

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                    ARRL Digital Contest - 2022

Call: K6LL
Operator(s): K6LL
Station: K6LL

Class: SO1R-8 LP
QTH: AZ DM22
Operating Time (hrs): 8

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
  160:     
   80:     
   40:  104
   20:  111
   15:   51
   10:     
    6:     
------------
Total:  266  Total Score = 5,731

Club: Arizona Outlaws Contest Club

Comments:

Thank God for the 8-hour category.  I don't think I could have taken much more
of these digital modes.  Give me RTTY any day!  It was interesting though. A lot
of the comments below are for my reference for next year.

It WAS different - no keyboards, no headphones, no hot amplifiers, and it was
interesting too. I always look under the green cursor in the waterfall display
to see who I am working, and it was amazing to see how well extremely weak or
QRM'ed signals were able to be decoded on FT8.

I couldn't get anything going on FT4. It seemed to be a confusing mix of contest
and non-contest stations in the same segment, and I didn't want to waste time
trying to wrap my head around it. There may be more to exploit there for next
year, but I never ran out of FT8 DX stations to work.

It took me a while to get into the different FT8 rhythms - contest mode CQ'ing,
contest mode S&P'ing, non-contest mode CQ'ing, non-contest mode S&P'ing
- each has its own different protocol and requirements for operator
intervention. Sometimes stations that I had already logged came back and needed
a final RR73 or something.  When I clicked on them, WSJT-X figured out what they
needed and sent it to them - amazing.  They went away happy.  If they are happy,
I am happy, whatever the hell just happened.

For the 8-hour category, I wanted to optimize the DX hours for max QSO points. 
That involved operating from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m local time working Asia/Oceania. 
That's a pretty tough schedule for a 78 year old person!  15 hung in there up to
midnight local time, even with the solar flux only at 100.  I found it much
easier to work Asia than Europe, even though signals were good from both.  Maybe
there's more competition or QRM with Europe.

In the 090 contest band segments, there seemed to be a preponderance of USA
stations, not exactly what I was looking for.  There was more DX in the regular
074 segments.  When calling CQ in 074, one has to be careful not to answer
stations who give you a signal report, rather than their grid square, on the
first call.  You will never get a grid square from those stations. It's too bad,
but a lot of very loud stations never got answered.  They probably think I am a
lid (which maybe I am). Fortunately, there were usually multiple callers, and I
just picked the ones who sent a grid square. I had "call 1st"
disabled.  There were a lot of tail-enders too, which sped things up a bit. It's
funny that even with all the furious and intense mouse-clicking, my overall rate
ended up at only 33/hour. I don't know if that's good or not.  It is what it
is.

During the contest, I used only WSJT-X software.  Afterwards I imported
wsjtx_log.adi into N1MM Logger, and N1MM worked beautifully to do the distance
scoring for 3830 and created a nice Cabrillo file, which was accepted on the
first shot by the contest robot.

In general, it seemed to be a successful event.  I'm already looking forward to
beating myself up again for 8 hours next year!

Thanks for all the QSO's, and thanks to the veteran FT8 ops for putting up with
a klutz intruding on your favorite bands.

Equipment: K3, tribander and short 2 el 40 on a 48' tower. (Spell checker just
suggested changing tribander to transgender!) 

Dave Hachadorian, K6LL
Yuma, AZ

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