[SCCC] K6Z CQP M/M County Expedition - Inyo County

[W6ph at aol.com]

Subject: CaQP K6Z M/MCntyExp HP
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 21:05:54 -0700

California QSO Party

Call: K6Z
Operator(s): W6PH, KI6VC, K6VR, W1MD, K6ZZ
Station: K6Z

Class: M/MCntyExp HP
QTH: INYO
Operating Time (hrs): 27

Summary:
Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs
--------------------
160:    60     35
80:   195     55
40:   408    271
20:   561    769
15:   170    173
10:             
6:             
2:             
--------------------
Total:  1394   1303  Mults = 58  Total Score = 393,704

Club: 

Comments:

For this year's CQP, our crew returned to W6PH's cabin QTH
just outside of Lone Pine in the Owens Valley.  It's a great
location with the Owens Valley in the foreground and Mt
Whitney staring down on you from behind.  Last year we dang
near froze to death, but this year the WX was a bit better. 
Temperatures were decent but we had some thunderstorms, wind
, and lot's of bugs to contend with this time out.

We set up Field Day style with two AB-577 military surplus
masts and a homebrew 35' tower trailer.  Antennas were a
homebrew 3 element 20M beam, Cushcraft 402-CD and Cushcraft
A3S for 10M and 15M.  We also put up an 80M sloper, Hygain
Hytower and 160M Inverted-L to work the low bands with. 
Kurt's homebrew 20M beam worked great.  It's a keeper for
sure.

We set up one station in the cabin, one on the porch and a
third in KI6VC's RV.
Rigs were an Elecraft K3, an ICOM IC-7000 and an ICOM
PRO-III each with an amplifier.  We switched logging
software this year to N1MM Logger in a three PC wireless
network.

I'm beginning to think there's no such thing as being 100
percent prepared for a radio contest.  If you think you're
ready, check again!  Something WILL happen.  By late Friday
afternoon all the stations and antennas were set up, checked
out, and ready to go.  Some quick checks for inter-station
interference, and then it was time for a BBQ and a few cold
807's.

After a tasty Saturday morning breakfast, it was time to man
battle stations and get ready to roll.  At T-15 minutes,
Murphy finally showed up.  We discovered a high SWR on the
40M beam.  Are PL-259's supposed to spin freely on the end
of your feedline?  After a fast connector replacement, we
were once again ready to roll.  The bell rang and we were
off and running.  Wait a minute, how come our PC's say we're
operating in the 7QP not the CQP?  Duh, what's up Doc?  Ok,
we restarted and now were ready to go.....again.  After a
few minutes we noticed the serial numbers started
incrementing by 3 or 4 on two of the three PC's.  What
gives?  Perhaps RF in the network?  We stopped and restarted
3 times, but the problem continued.  We certainly can't
operate like this.  After about 75 minutes of false starts,
we were about to dump N1MM and try something else when we
noticed that one of the PC's had a newer version of N1MM
loaded on it.  Bingo.  We reloaded an older version of N1MM
and the logging problems were finally under control. 
Certainly the worst was now behind us.  We were CQing on 40M
CW but the band seemed very dead.  After some testing we
found the receiver in the K3 had gone deaf.  Turned out to
be a bad PIN diode on the KXV3 board.  We had to tear
everything down and set up another ICOM IC-7000.  After
doing so, we operated pretty much problem free until Sunday
morning at which point we discovered the A3 SWR was now sky
high.  After some troubleshooting we found the balun had
crapped out.  We took the antenna down and jumpered around
the balun and put it back up again.  That got us through to
the end.

Overall, we had a great time.  We wanted to improve on last
year's score which we managed to do.  For the past two years
we ended with 57 multipliers missing NT each time.  This
time we had all 58 mults in the log before sundown Saturday
with NT worked several times.  Can we bank a few of those
Q's and use them next year?

Thanks the NCCC for another great contest and everyone for
the QSO's!

73, Bob K6ZZ