[SCCC] K6NA ARRL DX CW 2017

[Glenn Rattmann]

ARRL DX Contest, CW

Call: K6NA

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: SoCal
Operating Time (hrs): 32
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
  Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   160:   45    22
    80:  155    56
    40:  595    89
    20:  259    80
    15:  328    63
    10:   42    21
-------------------
Total: 1424   331  Total Score = 1,413,039

Club: Southern California Contest Club

Comments:
Pretty casual again this year... lots of wandering around the shack, 
watching the antennas bouncing around.
Several naps and some meals/TV time with XYL....
Huge rainstorm and winds over the weekend, occasional precip-static, 
but no lightning and pretty low QRN overall.
But the storm was a big distraction, with the roaring winds and 
rattling windows audible even through the
noise-cancelling phones.

The station upgrade remains elusive, with small progress here and 
there.  Lots of bad weather this season hasn't
helped.  Construction of the the new 20 and 15m Yagis continues 
slowly, but none of those are in the air yet.  One of the
old 15m antennas has several bent/broken tips, and a partially broken 
hairpin match due to the hawks, but "works" with funky SWR.
Hey-- It's 33 years old!

I installed a BOG for receive prior to CQ 160 in January,
and it seems to work on 80 and 160 pretty well, as advertised.

The 80m wire Yagi showed an intermittent problem just before NAQP, 
but magically it cured itself in time
for KI6RRN to use.  However, a week later the problem appeared again, 
permanently.   During three days prior to
the DX Test, I  accomplished repair of the broken feedpoint and added 
new Dacron lines to one of the dipoles, finishing of course at
Friday noon.  Hey, you don't want to be too well rested for these contests!

To keep things interesting one of my Alpha amps was showing some 
soft-fault indicators on Thursday.  About every five years I need to go in and
exercise all the pin headers and Molex connectors with DeoxIT and 
that clears up the phoney faults.  So of course I didn't get to that project
until near the start of the contest.  In a bid to give competitors an 
advantage, I started about an hour late due to those amplifier
shenanigans.  ;-)