[Mldxcc] ARRLDX CW N6XI M/2 HP

[Rick Tavan]

ARRL DX Contest, CW

Call: N6XI
Operator(s): N6XI K6NV
Station: N6XI

Class: M/2 HP
QTH: SV
Operating Time (hrs): 26

Summary:
  Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   160:   18    15
    80:   37    25
    40:  247    72
    20:  394    83
    15:  790    98
    10:  101    32
-------------------
Total: 1587   325  Total Score = 1,535,625

Club: Mother Lode DX & Contest Club

Comments:

This is a preliminary report; will update later when I resolve some issues that
may impact not only the score but even the category of operation!

Bob K6NV and I wanted to do a multi-two. With only two operators and a modest
station, we wouldn't be competitive but in M/2 we could both operate whenever
we wanted to. We didn't want to track band changes, just have as much fun
operating as possible, so I have to analyze the logs to see if we fit the M/2
rules. If not, we'll be a two-operator Multi-Multi!

But it gets worse. Bob had "downgraded" his computer from Win 7 to
Win 10 six days prior to the contest. This was its first outing for a contest
since that professionally-conducted but scary change. We had the same version
of N1MM+ on each computer. Bob wasn't able to get to the station until a few
hours into the contest, so we would be integrating the two computers on-the-fly
during the contest. (Don't try this yourself!) It wasn't pretty. While I was
running JAs, we tried to get both copies of MM+ on the network. We got all the
variables right, as far as I can tell, but we ended up with one-way
communication - the Win 7 machine could send Telnet spots and QSOs to the Win
10 machine, but the Win 10 machine couldn't send QSOs to the Win 7 machine. We
ended up dumping QSOs into ADIF files for transfer between machines whenever we
needed to change the computer which was to continue operating on a given band.
At the end of the contest, the two logs disagreed by about 65 QSOs and 30
mults. The score report above is from the larger log.

We spent several hours of total downtime trying to resolve the networking
issue. My son, an IT professional, remoted in to both machines and performed
some magic analysis but was unable to resolve the problem. It appears to be
outside N1MM since network ping shows the same unilateral characteristic - Win
7 can ping Win 10 but not vice versa. I'm pretty sure that if we resolve the
unidirectional pings we'll have it all working for the next time. If anyone out
there has any ideas, please let me know.

I may need some help sorting through the two logs (a) to make sure I have all
the QSOs in one place and (b) to see what category we were in!

/Rick N6XI


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