[SCCC] I Packed my Bags and went to Mexico for the ARRL 10 XE2DA M/S HP

[WN6K - Paul]

Although this was not an SCCC entry, I thought I would pass this along.

I had recently visited the XE2BC Club in Tijuana when the FMRE President was 
in town for their 64th birthday celebration. At that party, I had the 
opportunity to sit and have a talk with XE1VP, Victor about various topics 
and as a result, a short time later the club invited me to help them 
participate in the ARRL Ten Meter Contest in the M/S category.

We arrived early Friday and assessed what equipment they had and began to 
set up.  Understand that these fellows are not 'contesters' so this was a 
whole new bag of tricks for them.  Their clubhouse is on a city lot with a 
guyed tower up 85 ft.  On top sits an old TH6 which was not rotatable due to 
a bad Tail Twister Rotor - wait a minute that is redundant.  So the youngest 
guy in the club got up the tower and 'fixed' the TH6 at 60 degrees as we 
felt that was the optimum for collecting NA mults if the band were to be 
open in any kind of shape.  They also removed and repaired the wire antennas 
that hung at lower heights for future use.

The Club has wireless internet for doing club email and computer controlling 
their linked repeater system so we set about downloading N1MM as it was 
free.  I have not used it much myself but for a single band effort the 
learning curve was probably going to be short. At the start of the contest 
we had a 756Pro, their computer with N1MM, no interface, and using the 
internal keyer but hand keying with my Bencher from my dashboard of my Jeep. 
(Field Day in a shack)

Band was pretty sporadic (pun intended) Friday night with only CO hams 
making big signals in but good enough and slow enough to get the new ops on. 
I had also brought my laptop so I was re-reading the rules and found that - 
hey we sure could use an amplifier, internet interfacing (packet) and a rig 
interface would be nice too.  I also downloaded the manual for the Pro and 
quickly learned that I could at least program four keys to send reports and 
CQs - hey I told you I never used one before and these fellows were not 
contesters so they had not used the feature either.  (It wasn't till the 
second day till I discovered that it had a Voice Keyer in it also - arghh!)

Bottom line, we had fun with a grease board 'tote' score in the main room 
and a mult bell to alert those not in the shack room that they were making 
some progress.  Every Saturday they have a club swap meet in their compound 
so more members congregated throughout the day and wandered into the shack 
to see what was going on.  One of the ops came back with a vertical and set 
it up on the roof and we made use of it as a second antenna which came in 
handy to work a few of the South American / XEs.  Someone else went home and 
brought back an Ameritron so now they had 500 watts.  Another thought he had 
an interface (USB) line that might work and he went home to get that.  The 
amp was ok on the TH6 - had to retune it when we went from SSB to CW - but 
it was not used for the vertical.  We in a 'slow' time piddled with the 
interface dodad and FINALLY got the radio talking with the computer.  THIS 
WAS IMPORTANT as there were a number of times I would go into the shack and 
find that they had switch modes and forgot to manually tell N1MM that - so 
we were messing up our mults count.  (Sidenote: you can not completely edit 
N1MM for fixing these mistakes - Writelog is much easier to fix.)

To wrap this up, our efforts were a TEACHING process although I also learned 
quite a bit along the way.  We were not out to WIN anything in particular 
but to show the whole club a bit about contesting with the hopes to spark 
interest in building future projects - new antennas etc. to improve the 
station even for general use.

I had a wonderful time, XE2BC gang are gracious hosts - my Spanish is 46 
plus  years old but their adapting to me in English was excellent. Thank you 
to any of you that worked them and helped with our schooling project.

73, WN6K, Paul







                    ARRL 10-Meter Contest

Call: XE2DA
Operator(s): XE2DA,XE2SI,XE2EL,XE2GF,WN6K
Station: XE2DA

Class: M/S HP
QTH: BAC
Operating Time (hrs): 16

Summary:
Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   CW:  341    48
  SSB:  171    30
-------------------
Total:  512    78  Total Score = 132,912

Club:

Comments:

This is first time in long time for our local CREBC Club members with our 
friend
WN6K, Paul as our instructor.  We all learned a lot about computer interface 
and
hidden functions of 756PRO.

73 and many thanks for QSOs from friends on Ten and hope we meet again soon.

XE2DA, Ricardo and gang.


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