[UK-CONTEST] M6T (G4PIQ) RDXC Report

[Andy Cook, G4PIQ]

                    Russian DX Contest

Call: M6T
Operator(s): G4PIQ
Station: G0KPW

Class: SO Mixed HP
QTH: JO02RF
Operating Time (hrs): 23.5
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  CW Qs  Ph Qs  Countries  Oblasts
----------------------------------------
  160:   148    37       43        31
   80:   385   229       68        61
   40:   320   117       74        51
   20:   419   499       85        66
   15:    42    31       46         5
   10:     5     3        7         0
----------------------------------------
Total:  1319   916      323       214  Total Score = 7,279,572

Rig : 2 x FT1000MP + Alpha 87A + Titan

Ants :
160m : Dipole @ 28m
80m : 4 square + Dipole @ 20m
40m : 402CD @ 30m
20m : 204CD @ 28m + TH5 @ 32m
15m : Extended 155CA @ 20m
10m : 105CA @ 30m

Happy enough with this for a first attempt at this contest - surprisingly
close to the approachable competition (from this geography) so far. Several
lessons learnt and hope to apply them next year. 

Firstly the good things
 - Lots of activity 
 - Some good runs 
 - Nothing broke 
 - 24 hours is a walk in the park!

Now for the excuses (and memory jogger for next time......)

 - Was very short of time in the run-up to the contest (even worse than
usual it seemed) and limited to one evening to build station, 8 hours on the
Friday to build antennas, wind up towers, re-build SO2R box to work with
WinTest and spend half the day on the phone for work, then 90 mins before
contest to test and fix bugs. Was 'ready' 5 mins before the off, but only
had time to wind up tower with 15m antenna to 70% height. 

 - My big problem was that this was my first serious contest with Win-Test
(the proper packet and oblast support finally pushed me over the edge for
this contest). I need to take my TR configured SO2R brain out and put it
back in the other way round. Sent all sorts of odd messages, directed
headphones to strange places, deleted a few QSOs through operator error and
generally got irritated, but I now think I know enough to configure the
program better, and I do remember the same problem when I did my first
contest with TR (and not even with SO2R) . This rather hampered my SO2R
efficiency and enthusiasm! I think that the concept of having all SO2R
switching automated and over-rideable from the keyboard rather than on a
separate box is great though. 

 - Had trouble with the DSL line at site having been recently upgraded to
DSL Max. I'd previously sorted out the RFI issues, but 20m and 40m both
trashed it again this time around. It got better later in the contest (line
may have re-trained to a lower rate). I thought that this might happen so I
had a GPRS phone available as a backup, and did a quick, but not thorough
enough test prior to the start of the contest. I saw spots appear in the
cluster window, but didn't realise until I came to use it in anger a couple
of hours in that they weren't filling the bandmap. I think this was an RTM
error (should have entered loopback broadcast address rather than a LAN
address), but spent about 30 minutes trying to fix the cluster connectivity
problems during the contest and had somewhat intermittent cluster
connectivity mostly during the first few hours. 

 - From the operating perspective, I didn't go to 40m early enough, didn't
spend enough time on 160 and since this is the first time I've done a
serious single op packet assisted contest since 1996, from time to time I
fell into the trap of spending too long trying to work a difficult mult -
especially when a mult is only worth about 4 average QSOs (and more like 2
Russian QSOs) in this contest..

 - Conditions were lousy. I guess they were no worse than in the SSB ARRL
(although I wasn't active in anger for that), but - especially on Sunday,
20m sounded like 15m, 15m sounded like 10m and 10m sounded like 24 GHz -
thanks to G6PZ for the mult there! Was very glad that I made a tiny handful
(3 I think!) of African QSOs on 10m on the Saturday. I rather ignored 15m on
the Saturday (at least didn't dig deep for Russian mults), and assumed that
it would be better to Russia on Sunday morning. How wrong you can be
sometimes!

As usual many thanks to Bob, G4BAH for the use of the station.

73,

Andy, G4PIQ