[SECC] NAQP CW AA4LR Single Op LP

[Bill Coleman]

                   North American QSO Party, CW - January

Call: AA4LR
Operator(s): AA4LR
Station: AA4LR

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: GA
Operating Time (hrs): 9.6

Summary:
Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
 160:   55    21
  80:   81    33
  40:  145    46
  20:  125    42
  15:   61    28
  10:   33    10
-------------------
Total:  500   180  Total Score = 90,000

Club: South East Contest Club

Team: 

Comments:

Antennas:
160/80/40m trap inverted-L at 10m with 24 radials
80/40 trap dipole at 10m

Equipment:
K3/100 w/ KAT3 running 100 watts

Comments:

Unfortunately, full time efforts in the NAQP have become something of a rare thing for me. This score was pretty good, and close to my personal best of 96,000. Equalled my personal best of 500 Qs, only falling short on multipliers.

Conditions were not exactly great. High bands closed down pretty rapidly after sunset, and the low bands were really noisy. Very difficult to pull out contacts on 80m, and much harder on 160m.

10m was open at the start, with plenty of signals. Couldn't run, but got plenty of answers to my calls. Didn't feel quite as strong on 15m. Delayed moving to 20m until 2100z to try to soak up the 10 and 15m mults. Was able to run pretty effectively on 20m, with a bit of S & P until 2300z. Sunset was about
2140z.

Nothing but running at first on 40m. At 0100z, 80m was pretty much unoccupied, so back to 40m 15 minutes later. Try again at 0200z and a bit more activity on 80m. Noise levels make it slow work.

I did manage to figure out a station problem at this time. I had some difficulty using the trap dipole to run on 80m. Something in the transmissions was messing with the keyboard and causing the F-keys not to work for a short period of time. The inverted-L is not as effective close-in as the dipole, so my right might have suffered a bit.

The problem had to do with an HDMI cable plugged into the little Acer I use for logging. Unplugging it allowed the F-keys to work even when using the dipole. Too bad I didn't figure tho out earlier. Of course, I lost my second monitor, so I couldn't see the multiplier list.

Hit 160m first at 0230z, but not a lot going on due to the noise. Then up to 40m (20m was completely empty), 80m and finally 160m. 

Happy to hand out a few Qs. Great fun!


Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr at arrl.net
Web: http://boringhamradiopart.blogspot.com
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
           -- Wilbur Wright, 1901