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CQ WPX RTTY Contest 2010
Well, this is my best contest score so far. And I worked only 19 hours and 28 minutes out to the 30 hours allowed. I did not loose sleep and had quite a few other things do do over the weekend, So I really can be happy with the results.
My Cushcraft MA5B rotator, a simple Radio Shack one, probably got water in its cogs as it will not rotate when temperatures are below freezing, and that antenna while functional only in the north easterly direction is not producing heat (not a cloud warmer) so the ice does not melt in the rotator. At least it was pointing towards Europe. There is plenty of snow on the roof, no time to fool with antennas now.
I made some new DX contacts and have now Wales and Norway confirmed via LoTW. I also hope to get a confirmation from New Zealand. I made contacts on 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters. Only two on ten meters but that's better than none.
The contest happened just on a the weekend when I got my Ten-Tec 715 Speech Processor. It did not do me any good on an RTTY contest but I hope that it will help me break a few pile-ups easier in the future. I installed it today and it seems to be working hopefully making my voice more intelligible and stronger in lands far away. While I know that an amplifier will help, I prefer working on my antennas and signal first before inserting raw power.
Good effort Amir! Is that screenshot from N1MM? Are you using N1MM for logging in a contest?
ReplyDeleteI was really thrilled with 15m this weekend. Best it has ever been since I've been on HF. I didn't give 10m even a listen but maybe I should have just to see if anyone was around. I actually made a 10m contact this afternoon with TI8II with Carlos being an easy 599 booming into NJ.
One of these days we'll make an actual contest contact!
73,
K2DSL - David
http://www.k2dsl.com
Yes David, it is a screen shot from N1MM (via
ReplyDeleteVista's snipping tool), but I did not use it for the contest. I will only use it if/when I can have it running first for phone, as for RTTY I need to have it run concurrently with MMTTY, something I have not done yet.
HRD v5 really stinks when it comes to Cabrillo, so I've imported my ADIF file to N1MM and and fixing it there, as it is just about as easy to do it in N1MM as going through any other procedure. And maybe I get a little familiar with N1MM as well so who knows, I might be giving it another shot someday, probably on a minor contest. I think that some of the problems I had were due to a flaky serial to USB driver which also drove HRD batty. Now all is stable on this computer so I can perhaps be a little more adventuresome.
73,
Amir K9CHP