[Fourlanders] CQWW Contest Summary W4NH

[Bob Lear]

Well, in a word:  NoPropagation!!  Pretty disappointing for the group up 
here to operate the contest and exercise the K-3's.  We ended up with 
11,529 points which was 119Q's and 45 Grids on 6m and 35Q's and 16 Grids 
on 2m for a total of 154 Q's.  I don't think this will put us in the 
running for anything, but if everyone else experienced the same dead 
bands then maybe we won't look too bad in the final accounting.  We did 
have a good time sitting around and BSing and folks got plenty of 
internet and e-mail time through the wireless connection as so little 
else was going on!

We did have a couple of short openings into NE, Canada and the Carribean 
on 6m, but they didn't last long.  Probably best DX was K1TOL and K1WHS 
in Maine.

This may have been similar to the January SS.  I am going to look at the 
6 and 2 grid maps for SS and WW and see how they compare as I think we 
mostly just had our groundwave footprint.  A few more points and Q's in 
January were due to 222 and 432.  I will check it out.  Brian will 
submit the log to CQWW and handle any QSL requests for W4NH.

Operators were Kos N4NIA, Brian NX9O, Jim W4KXY, Bob W4ZST and Skip 
K5AWC who all spent Saturday night at the QTH for the contest.  Also 
operating were Buck KC4GCK who started out on 6m while I was still 
setting up the 2m station, Ron WW8RR and Scott NN4W.  We were visited by 
Randal N4AC and Ivan K4VJM also.  Thanks also to Kos for coming up on 
Friday evening and helping me finish the phone and network wiring in the 
new shack.

We had a great meal Saturday night of Sampler Platters from Shane's Rib 
Shack and it seemed like a regular FourLanders contest as we stuffed 
ourselves.  Skip made the trip to town to pick them up for us.  I cooked 
breakfast Sunday morning for the overnighters and we had plenty there 
too, enough that no one seemed to notice that we didn't have anything 
for lunch on Sunday!

One major highlight was some more WSJT practice.  We worked K5QE 
Saturday night on a 6m Sked, then passed them over to 2m where we 
completed our first WSJT on 2m with them.  We also worked K2DRH random 
on 6m and almost completed on 2m also.  Missed one other random on 6. 
We are maybe figuring this WSJT thing out now.  Managed to get both 
stations set up and working this time so we should be able to continue 
next contest.  We really do need to monitor the regular calling freqs 
during receive time to make sure we aren't missing an opening worth a 
lot more points as the WSJT contacts are pretty long and time consuming. 
  We did discuss the need to have a way to switch back and forth more 
simply than we are doing now.

Other than all the problems I had getting a couple of 'new to 
contesting' computers set up for the contest there weren't many other 
problem.  We did have some audio settings on the K-3's that we weren't 
able to figure out until Scott came in Sunday morning, but otherwise we 
were pretty happy with them.  I still think they should be able to turn 
off QSK completely which we couldn't make them do.

We also tried out Brian's 2m/222 super wheel antennas on 2m for Omni. 
They seemed to work OK, but I think conditions being what they were, we 
might not have gotten a good comparison.

I will send a couple of pix of the stations as set-up in the new shack 
to several of you who didn't make it up to the contest with us.  If 
anyone else wants to see them, shoot me an e-mail and I'll send them on 
to you also as we can't send attachments over the reflector and I don't 
have a web page to put them on.  I only took 3 pics so far anyway.

Start thinking about the September contest on the mountain as we are 
only SEVEN weeks away from that now.  I'll send a kick-off update 
shortly for that.

73, Bob W4ZST