[RTTY] RTTY WPX AA5AU SOAB LP

[Don Hill AA5AU]

                    CQ/RJ RTTY WPX Contest
                    
Call: AA5AU
Operator(s): AA5AU
Station: AA5AU

Class: SOAB LP
QTH: LA
Operating Time (hrs): 30
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band     QSOs   Points   Prefixes
-----------------------------------
   80:     89     212
   40:    178     624
   20:    374     741
   15:    424     900
   10:    439    1105
-----------------------------------
Total:   1504    3582       493  =  1,765,926

Club: 

Comments:

The highlight of the weekend was working YA5T on 12M CW early Sunday morning 
and hearing my call clearly!  It pushed my regular restart time for the contest 
back 15 minutes, but it was worth it.

I came a lot closer to last year's record than I thought possible.  Condx were 
not that great on Saturday.  Sunday was much better.  The low bands were great 
Saturday night but there weren't a lot of DX stations to work.  I couldn't seem 
to get any real good runs going this year like I did last year.  40 and 80 were terrible
Friday night.  Usually the problem is noise down here, but this time it was just
plain poor propagation.  Signals had terrible flutter.  The PK232 ended up pulling
out more copy than MMTTY (supporting Scot's earlier observation - the PK232
is still a worthy TNC).

This was the first time for using the MMTTY Plug-in for WriteLog as the main
RTTY engine for both radios/computers and it worked very well.  On one radio
I did have dual transmit with MMTTY & a DXP-38 and that worked like a charm.

I used the WT4I Cabrillo Tools program to keep exact track of my off-time and
somehow, managed to work exactly 30 hours, 0 minutes - what a feat!

I guess the highlight of the contest had to be when EA8/DJ1OJ called me on 80M 
and he was loud.  I worked two EU on 80.  I heard many more but they never heard me.

The biggest boost in the score was due to a feature in WriteLog that GU0SUP 
enlightened me to Friday before the contest that allowed me to easier handle 
sending serial numbers when in QSO with 2 stations at the same time (not to be
confused with transmitting at the same time!).  It helped tremendously but still
didn't stop me from hitting the wrong keys a few times.  Sorry about that!

The most amazing part of the contest was having only 11 dupes in 1515 total 
QSO's.  It was another great contest and I was glad to be a part of it.  Thanks 
to everyone who worked me.  Thanks to RJ & CQ for sponsoring it.

73, Don AA5AU
http://www.aa5au.com
http://www.geocities.com/writelog