[SCCC] NA Sprint CW W4EF HP

[Michael Tope]

                  SPRINT CW Summary Sheet

        Start Date : 2020-09-13

     CallSign Used : W4EF
       Operator(s) : W4EF

Operator Category : SINGLE-OP
Assisted Category : NON-ASSISTED
              Band : ALL
             Power : HIGH
              Mode : CW

          Software : N1MM Logger+ 1.0.8647.0

         Band     QSOs     Pts  Sec  Pt/Q
          3.5      91      91    0   1.0
            7     101     100   19   1.0
           14      36      36   21   1.0
        Total     228     227   40   1.0


             Score : 9,080
               Rig : Elecraft K3 + Alpha 87A

          Antennas : 20 meter inverted V at ~25ft
                     1/4 wave verticals for 40 and 80 meters on a common 
feedline and radial field.

Sorry that I didn't join the team for this. I was preoccupied with 
reorganizing my various piles of "things I might actually use someday" 
into piles of "things that can be found without a crew of 
archeologists". Thankfully we got some unseasonably cool weather in the 
high-desert on Friday (due at in least some part to the forest fire 
smoke blanketing the sky) which made the work a lot more tolerable than 
it otherwise would have been. There were a number of Rohn 55 tower 
sections in those various piles that needed reorganizing which seem to 
have become much heavier over the years.

I worked all day Friday and all day Saturday right up to the hour before 
the Sprint. At that point participating in the Sprint no-longer seemed 
like an impediment to the progress of my reorganization project, but 
rather a much needed break from the physical toil. It was about that 
time that I remembered that I left both of my Heil headsets at home back 
in Los Angeles. I thought no problem, I have an old pair of iPhone 
earbuds with a 3.5mm connector that I should be able to plug into the 
K3. Unfortunately, I had (uncharacteristically) left all my audio 
adapters back in LA. Still I figured that with all the miscellaneous 
cables lying around the shack, I should be able find something to go 
from the 3.5mm plug on the earbuds to the 1/4" phone jack on the K3. It 
turns out that I was wrong.

The contest was getting ready to start, so I settled on using the 
headphone jack on the front panel of the PC that I use to control my 
station (I feed the line-out audio from the K3 into the PC's sound 
card). This seem to work fine, until I tried sending CW by hand. It 
turned out that the audio delay through the computer was high enough 
that I couldn't send CW by hand worth a darn. This really pissed me off 
as I like to be able to grab the paddles and send by hand when things 
get fowled up with N1MM data entry (I really hate using Ctrk-K).

Finally I plugged the earbuds directly into one of the rear-panel audio 
outputs of the K3. This worked, but the cord to the earbuds was barely 
long enough and I could only get audio in one ear (it turns out that the 
TRRS plug on the earbuds works okay when plugged into the headphone jack 
on the front of the computer, but not when plugged into the rear panel 
jack on the K3). I ended up limping along with a combination of the K3 
speaker and one working earbud. I am not sure it mattered, however, as 
the real choke point was more cognitive than acoustic. This became 
obvious when I started busting names that I normally know by heart. I 
had to ask K9CT to repeat his name at least once (may be even twice). It 
was like there was a cognitive time delay and then suddenly - oh duh, 
it's "Craig" :-). Even worse was one of my QSOs with N9RV. I copied 
"Rat" and had my self convinced in that instant that N9RV was part of 
some K7RAT Sprint Team, it wasn't until I asked for a repeat that 
suddenly - oh duh, it's "Pat", a guy who I have only worked 10,000 times 
in the Sprint :-[.

Right after the dog ate my homework, I noticed that I had no rig control 
and all my twenty meter contacts were showing up in N1MM at 14025 KHz. 
Since my goal for this Sprint was to focus on participation rather than 
competition (a man has got to know his limitations), I decided to stop 
and fix the problem. So began another large zero QSO gap in my log. 
That's when I realized N1MM was trying to talk to Ham Radio Deluxe's 
virtual COM port which wasn't present since I never opened HRD. This is 
the setup I sometimes use for remote operation. For some reason, I 
decided it was vitally important that I change settings so N1MM was 
talking directly to the K3. Then I realized I couldn't remember which 
COM port HRD was using to talk to the K3. I am sure I have it documented 
in my station technical diary, but I figured I could just open up HRD 
and it would show me the selected COM port straight away. Unfortunately, 
I couldn't figure out how to find that in HRD to save my life. After 
what seemed like forever, I got N1MM talking to the rig and was off to 
the races.

My success with the rig control was short-lived. When I QSYed to 40 
meters and tried to make my first QSO, N1MM reported a dupe. Wait, 
that's impossible, right? Crap, the rig control between N1MM and the K3 
had died again. I decided I would switch back to the virtual COM port 
and let HRD run in the background. That fixed the problem and I had 
accurate frequency information going into my log from that point 
forward. However, Murphy wasn't done with me yet. It sounded like the 
tuning motors on the Alpha 87A were starting to hunt (a problem with the 
87A's frequency counter that I thought I had fixed). Fortunately, it 
never got really bad. I did seem to have problems with the RF drive from 
the K3. It was as if the control was soft and had hysteresis. I kept 
over-driving the amplifier and tripping the KAT-500 tuner which gets 
unhappy when you hit it with power levels over ~1KW when its correcting 
for excessive VSWR (my 40 and 80 meter antennas need retuning).

Despite all the setbacks and challenges, I am still glad I had the 
opportunity to join the fray. Never a dull moment. See you all next time.

73, Mike W4EF......................