CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB
Call: W6YX
Operator(s): K6UFO,W7SW,N6DE,W6LD,N9FZX,WJ6O,KX6C,WX5S,N7MH,AD6FX,KG6JQR
Station: W6YX
Class: M/2 HP
QTH: Stanford, CA
Operating Time (hrs): 48
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
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160: 6 3 3
80: 83 13 29
40: 350 25 49
20: 332 33 109
15: 828 37 119
10: 622 29 92
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Total: 2221 140 401 Total Score = 3,221,114
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
Many thanks to Mark, K6UFO, for organizing this effort and for providing a
preliminary contest write-up. We had contributions from many club members and
had 2 stations on the air for most of the contest. We decided to go M/2 so that
we could involve more club members and since we didn't have enough
operator-hours to do a real M/M.
The first bad news of the contest was that we wouldn't be able to use the ACOM
2000A amplifier because it was wired for 220V and we had a competing group in
the club using the second 220V outlet for a 2-meter KW amplifier in the ARRL EME
contest. So we used two FT1000MP transceivers, one with an Alpha 87A and the
other with an Alpha 78 amplifier.
We discovered that the 15 meter filter in one of our ICE 419's was kaput. About
10 minutes before the contest started I noticed that we were starting on 15
meters on the station that lacked a working bandpass filter, so I suggested
switching to 10 meters and doing 15 on the other station. We switched
everything around and tried tuning the Alpha-78 on 10 meters, but it wasn't
tuning as expected. After fruitlessly tuning for a few seconds, the Alpha shut
down with a blown fuse. That's when I noticed that the Six-Pak was still in the
15-meter position. Somehow we found a spare fuse quickly, got it installed, and
made our first 10-meter QSO at 0007Z.
We spent the hour before the contest trying to get connected to the local packet
network without any success. On Sunday we swapped in a new TNC and it mostly
worked except for the interface with our logging software, so we could submit
spots but not see them. I hope our local friends appreciated all our spots.
I'm not sure packet would have worked at night anyway since the 1 KW EME station
was pegging the meter on the 2-meter rig every time they transmitted. We could
occasionally hear the 10 WPM CW signal from the EME station on the HF bands in
spite of all our bandpass filtering. The EME guys managed 7 Q's over the 2
nights, a rate of about 1 QSO per 2 hours operated, with just a pair of yagis,
the KW, and a good pre-amp. The second weekend of the EME contest coincides
with CQWW CW - more fun for all!
Since we had no packet we set up a 3rd station for spotting a couple of hours
into the contest. After having done M/S with the multiplier station rule we
really didn't adapt well to the M/2 band change rule. We mostly just stayed on
one band for a long time and didn't switch often to work multipliers.
Of the 3 stations I heard that were working by numbers, I found two of them just
as they were asking for 6's. But since I didn't know their callsigns I politely
waited for them to repeat their call. In both cases they went on to 7's when
they repeated their call. We waited around and worked PZ5RA when he got back to
6's, but I sat waiting for 5U7JK on 20 for the last 15 minutes of the contest
only to get beat out by VE6AO when he returned to 6's for 1 Q.
We had some audio problems that may have been caused by stray RF. We eventually
got it fixed but apologize to anyone that had to ask for repeats because of our
bad audio. Thanks to all for the Q's.
See you all in CQWW CW and SS Phone.
-Mike, N7MH
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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