First, a million thanks to Kevin AD6Z and his wife Christine for letting me use his station again this year - and for that awesome banana bread. Kevin's located in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos, CA, and has a fabulous station:
80m: Dipole @ 110', main lobes N/S, Dipole @ 120', main lobes E/W
40m: Moxon @ 50', 2 el yagi @ 70 '
20m: 5 el yagi @ 70'
15m: 5/5 yagi stack
10m: 5 el yagi
Beverage receive antenna
Score Summary:
Op Time: 24 hoursThis is a personal best for me operating from a single station (last year I had 1215 QSOs, but that was across two different stations). I'm happy with the score, but I know I can do better.
Band QSOs Pts Mlt
3.5 108 216 2
7 301 602 5
14 162 324 4
21 280 560 20
28 248 496 49
Total 1099 2198 80
Score: 175,840
Like last year, I brought my Elecraft K3 and plugged into Kevin's Ameritron AL-1200B amplifier. The antenna switching is well laid out, with a StackMatch and SixPack making antenna selection very point and shoot. The rotators were also computer controllable, although I tended to to leave everything pointed at about 70 degrees except when chasing a multi I needed.
On the drive up, I was tuning around the bands on my HF mobile and, despite a lousy antenna, was hearing many, many CW beacons on 10 meters, including a VY2. Thad me me think really hard about starting on 10 meters.
Everything at Kevin's was set, as I'd been up there Thursday night to get my K3 hooked up and verify that everything was working correctly, including my computer, which last year had a disk fail at the start of the contest. I had about an hour to tune around the bands, so I put out a few "test km6i" to poke the reverse beacon network, and noted that I was 30 dB+ snr into some of the east coast skimmers. I decided to start on 10m.
Like last year, Kevin set up his SDR IQ on the extra 80m dipole and hooked up CW Skimmer, which gave me access to very high-quality spots. I'm amazed at how well CW skimmer does its job. It does bust calls occasionally, but I'd put the error rate at well below 1%. Since it has a built-in packet cluster, I just connected to it like any other cluster in N1MM.
At the start of the contest I spent the first two hours on 10m running and occasionally chasing skimmer spots. I dropped to 15 and had my best hour (97 QSOs), made a short pass through 20 and headed down to 40. During the 0400Z hour I went to 80, but rate really went down, so I went back up to 40 and things picked back up. I quit at 1 am and had 643 Qs and 78 sections (needed ND and NL).
Recording of my 97/QSO hour (sorry about the audio quality - I think the recorder I used for this had some sort of AGC and I didn't think to turn it off):
I started the next morning at 6am local time on 20, but noticed that the skimmer was seeing a lot of activity on 15, so I moved up before the hour was out. 15 seemed to dry up a bit, so I dropped back down to 20 at 8 am for an hour, then jumped up to 10. Rate was fairly steady around 50 Q/hour.
Around 11am, with 836 Qs in the log, rate started to fall off quite a bit, and most of the skimmer spots in the N1MM bandmap were gray, indicating that I was running out of stations to work. At this point, I switched between running for a while, then stopping to let the Skimmer work (it was getting desensed and didn't get much time to listen when I was beacon-CQing). After the map populated, I would go into "shooting fish in a barrel" mode, waiting for an unworked call to show up and pouncing on it. It's S&P without the "S". Lazy? Probably. Effective? Yes. I kept this up until the end of the contest, although I did make a number of manual passes through the bands listening for stations the skimmer had not found (there were a few, but not many).
Another great thing at Kevin's is the beverage he installed recently. I connected this to the aux antenna input of my K3 and used it with the subreceiver in diversity mode. Simply put, it was awesome. I've used diversity receive at home a bit, but I don't think my antennas are"diverse" enough to fully take advantage of the feature. At Kevin's, though, it was amazing. Signals that would have experienced a deep fade on a single antenna would instead swing from one side to the other in the stereo mix (diversity receive on the K3 places the receivers one in each ear). Even with weak east coast stations on 80 meters, I hardly ever needed fills. It gave me a lot of confidence to call stations I normally would not have.
A couple of other highlights/lowlights/notes:
- This is the first time I've had to give EU stations a signal report so they would leave me alone. And on 10 meters yet! Kevin noted that we were lighting up the EU skimmers - perhaps that was part of it.
- We dodged the power failure that hit W6NL. Kevin's power comes down from a different direction, apparently.
- During the first day of the contest, I was running and, when I didn't get calls for a while, I would surf over to a spot and work it, then Alt-Q to get back to my run frequency. One time, however, I was in a hurry to get back to CQing, and I unknowingly fat-fingered the Alt-Q and CQd on top of the guy I'd just worked. Unfortunately, I didn't notice it right away, because I got a response, so I inadvertently stole the poor guy's run frequency (I did hear a well-deserved, sarcastic "TU" though). I figured out who I'd done it to and sent an apology via email, and he was *very* nice about it.
- My 837th contact was with my friend Tim, KT8K in Ann Arbor. Running 5w and wire antennas, his number to me was 416. Only 0.3% of my power, but almost 50% of my rate!
- Almost half my QSOs (48%) were on 10 or 15. And I got 61% of my mults on 10. Thanks, Sol!
- QRP stations seemed to benefit from the good band conditions. Many times I had S9+ stations give me a "Q" precedence. And I worked 90 of them (8% of my contacts).
- We dodged the power outage that got W6NL - Kevin's power comes down from Skyline Blvd., and although we had a few minor brownouts, it stayed on.
And some lessons learned
- With good-quality skimmer spots, you can achieve pretty good rate solely S&P. The technique I developed was to select 3 or 4 unworked spots, and sequence through them to identify the one most likely to finish the QSO next (since the SS exchange is so long, it's really to your advantage to do this).
- SS Prefills are a blessing and a curse, but mostly a blessing.
- Having the prefill allows me to be faster on the turnaround at the end of a contact if the exchange I'm receiving from the other station matches the prefill - my finger is already on the enter key.
- If your attention wanes, it's easy to not actively check the preflll. I thought this would be rare, but it actually happens quite a bit when you're focusing your mental energy on what to do next. The incoming exchange has the serial number first, which you need to copy, but then the rest of the exchange may be prefilled, and it's easy to, say, start thinking about which spot you're going to grab next. I found I really had to focus on double-checking the prefill.
- With the prefills, the band map can also actively advise you of new mults you need. For example, on Sunday morning my band map was completely full of gray (already worked) spots, and a W0 popped up in red, because the prefill "knew" he was in North Dakota, which was the last multi I needed. One click, one call, and my sweep was complete.
- Once in a while, if I hit Esc to terminate a message, my rig won't unkey. It's not transmitting, but the PTT from the Winkey is asserted, so the receiver is turned off. The only way I've found to get out of this mode is to send another message and hit Esc again. This is a real bummer because I like to abort my "TU" message, (which is "TU KM6I") after the "TU" when I know I've got a several-deep pileup. It not only makes things a little faster, but tends to thin the pileup a bit, or at least spread out the callers in time.
- When surfing packet spots, it's a good idea to click the spot, then tune up or down about 100 Hz. This separates you from all the other spot-surfers who are all zero-beat with each other. Being on the running side of the equation, I noticed that if I had, say, 4 stations calling, with 3 of them zero-beat and one way up or down in frequency, I would get the outlier's call first.
- Another technique I used was sort of a poor-man's SO2R. It works like this:
- Get a run frequency and call CQ.
- When things dry up, look at your bandmap. If there is an unworked spot, click it. If the QSO is just about to end, hang out and try once to make the S&P contact.
- After (a) deciding the contact won't finish soon, or (b) calling once and losing, or © making the contact, hit ALT-Q (in N1MM at least) to pop back to your run frequency, and if no one has stolen it, call CQ.
- This poor-man's SO2R technique works a lot better if you have a monitor that's tall enough to show the whole band. My netbook has such a tiny screen that this wasn't as effective as it could have been.
- CW Skimmer spots show the caller's CW speed. This helps you, say, avoid blasting some 20 WPM CQer with your 35 WPM callsign (although, I have to say, when I did accidentally do this to people, they did a great job of coping my call. I did, of course, QRS for the exchange).
- The smaller keys on my netbook caused some fat-finger QLFs.
- In the heat of battle, I found it easy to hit the wrong F-key when using them for fills. I think the function key template I have taped to the computer could be clearer.
If I worked you in the contest, thanks for the QSO, and thanks for reading!
73,
- Gordon
Rate Sheet:
Cabrillo Statistics (Version 10g) by K5KA & N6TVhttp://bit.ly/cabstat
CALLSIGN: KM6I
CONTEST: ARRL-SS-CW
CATEGORY-OPERATOR: SINGLE-OP
CATEGORY-TRANSMITTER: ONE
OPERATORS: KM6I
-------------- Q S O R a t e S u m m a r y ---------------------
Hour 160 80 40 20 15 10 Rate Total Pct
--------------------------------------------------------------------
2100 0 0 0 0 0 76 76 76 6.9
2200 0 0 0 0 0 76 76 152 13.8
2300 0 0 0 0 69 6 75 227 20.7
0000 0 0 0 13 57 0 70 297 27.0
0100 0 0 51 4 0 0 55 352 32.0
0200 0 0 62 0 0 0 62 414 37.7
0300 0 0 59 0 0 0 59 473 43.0
0400 0 23 13 0 0 0 36 509 46.3
0500 0 2 49 0 0 0 51 560 51.0
0600 0 47 0 0 0 0 47 607 55.2
0700 0 25 11 0 0 0 36 643 58.5
0800 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 643 58.5
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 643 58.5
1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 643 58.5
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 643 58.5
1200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 643 58.5
1300 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 643 58.5
1400 0 0 0 35 12 0 47 690 62.8
1500 0 0 0 0 43 0 43 733 66.7
1600 0 0 0 53 0 0 53 786 71.5
1700 0 0 0 0 0 50 50 836 76.1
1800 0 0 0 0 9 28 37 873 79.4
1900 0 0 0 0 28 0 28 901 82.0
2000 0 0 0 0 20 12 32 933 84.9
2100 0 0 0 15 12 0 27 960 87.4
2200 0 0 3 18 7 0 28 988 89.9
2300 0 0 0 11 23 0 34 1022 93.0
0000 0 0 16 13 0 0 29 1051 95.6
0100 0 8 19 0 0 0 27 1078 98.1
0200 0 3 18 0 0 0 21 1099 100.0
------------------------------------------------------
Total 0 108 301 162 280 248 1099
Gross QSOs=1104 Dupes=5 Net QSOs=1099
Unique callsigns worked = 1099
The best 60 minute rate was 97/hour from 2331 to 0030
The best 30 minute rate was 102/hour from 2331 to 0000
The best 10 minute rate was 114/hour from 2349 to 2358
The best 1 minute rates were:
3 QSOs/minute 3 times.
2 QSOs/minute 199 times.
1 QSOs/minute 692 times.
There were 23 bandchanges and 0 (0.0%) probable 2nd radio QSOs.
Number of letters in callsigns
Letters # worked
-----------------
3 1
4 695
5 311
6 90
7 1
9 1
------------ M u l t i p l i e r S u m m a r y ------------
Mult 160 80 40 20 15 10 Total Pct
-------------------------------------------------------------
VA 0 5 10 12 17 11 55 5.0
IL 0 2 12 5 6 17 42 3.8
MN 0 3 11 2 11 15 42 3.8
MDC 0 2 17 8 6 6 39 3.5
OH 0 1 6 8 9 14 38 3.5
WWA 0 7 16 1 9 4 37 3.4
SCV 0 4 6 3 6 16 35 3.2
STX 0 2 7 4 7 13 33 3.0
EPA 0 6 7 5 7 7 32 2.9
WI 0 5 7 1 9 8 30 2.7
TN 0 4 6 7 5 6 28 2.5
CO 0 3 10 6 9 0 28 2.5
NC 0 1 9 3 11 3 27 2.5
NTX 0 0 4 0 8 14 26 2.4
OR 0 3 13 1 3 4 24 2.2
IN 0 6 8 3 2 4 23 2.1
AZ 0 1 10 8 3 1 23 2.1
MI 0 2 4 3 4 9 22 2.0
EMA 0 2 7 3 4 3 19 1.7
SV 0 1 7 2 2 6 18 1.6
WNY 0 1 2 3 9 2 17 1.5
NH 0 1 4 5 4 2 16 1.5
SFL 0 0 3 2 5 6 16 1.5
EB 0 1 4 0 6 5 16 1.5
ON 0 2 4 3 6 1 16 1.5
AL 0 1 2 3 4 5 15 1.4
GA 0 0 3 3 5 4 15 1.4
ORG 0 4 6 3 1 1 15 1.4
CT 0 0 3 4 5 1 13 1.2
ENY 0 0 4 1 6 2 13 1.2
WCF 0 0 4 0 8 0 12 1.1
NM 0 2 2 2 6 0 12 1.1
WPA 0 0 3 1 6 1 11 1.0
MO 0 0 0 4 1 5 10 0.9
SJV 0 1 5 0 1 3 10 0.9
NLI 0 0 2 3 3 2 10 0.9
KS 0 3 3 1 1 2 10 0.9
IA 0 2 2 3 1 2 10 0.9
SDG 0 2 5 0 3 0 10 0.9
MAR 0 0 4 2 1 2 9 0.8
OK 0 0 0 0 4 5 9 0.8
LA 0 2 2 1 3 1 9 0.8
ME 0 1 4 0 2 2 9 0.8
NFL 0 0 2 2 4 1 9 0.8
LAX 0 1 5 1 2 0 9 0.8
SF 0 4 2 1 1 1 9 0.8
BC 0 0 2 3 2 1 8 0.7
SNJ 0 1 4 1 2 0 8 0.7
WY 0 2 3 1 2 0 8 0.7
NNJ 0 0 2 0 3 2 7 0.6
EWA 0 1 1 2 1 2 7 0.6
MT 0 1 4 0 1 1 7 0.6
AK 0 0 2 0 4 1 7 0.6
UT 0 2 4 1 0 0 7 0.6
KY 0 1 0 1 3 2 7 0.6
SD 0 1 2 0 1 2 6 0.5
SK 0 0 1 0 2 3 6 0.5
WMA 0 0 2 0 3 1 6 0.5
WV 0 1 2 1 1 1 6 0.5
VT 0 2 1 2 1 0 6 0.5
NV 0 1 1 1 1 1 5 0.5
WTX 0 1 0 1 3 0 5 0.5
ID 0 1 2 1 1 0 5 0.5
SC 0 1 0 1 2 1 5 0.5
AR 0 1 0 0 1 2 4 0.4
QC 0 0 1 2 0 1 4 0.4
VI 0 0 1 2 0 1 4 0.4
NNY 0 1 0 1 1 1 4 0.4
PAC 0 0 2 0 2 0 4 0.4
SB 0 1 2 1 0 0 4 0.4
RI 0 0 1 2 0 1 4 0.4
MS 0 0 1 0 1 1 3 0.3
NE 0 0 0 0 1 2 3 0.3
DE 0 0 0 1 2 0 3 0.3
AB 0 1 1 1 0 0 3 0.3
PR 0 0 1 0 0 2 3 0.3
ND 0 0 0 1 2 0 3 0.3
NWT 0 0 1 0 0 1 2 0.2
MB 0 0 0 1 1 0 2 0.2
NL 0 0 0 1 0 1 2 0.2
------------------------------------------------------
Total 0 108 301 162 280 248 1099
Sweepstakes Checks
Check QSOs Pct
----------------------
00 6 0.5
01 1 0.1
02 2 0.2
03 2 0.2
04 1 0.1
05 6 0.5
06 5 0.5
07 3 0.3
08 3 0.3
09 3 0.3
10 5 0.5
11 10 0.9
12 7 0.6
13 4 0.4
14 6 0.5
15 2 0.2
16 5 0.5
17 5 0.5
18 7 0.6
19 6 0.5
20 5 0.5
21 4 0.4
22 5 0.5
23 3 0.3
24 3 0.3
25 2 0.2
26 3 0.3
27 6 0.5
28 2 0.2
29 1 0.1
30 4 0.4
31 2 0.2
32 7 0.6
33 5 0.5
34 3 0.3
35 1 0.1
36 1 0.1
37 3 0.3
38 3 0.3
39 7 0.6
40 4 0.4
41 1 0.1
42 3 0.3
43 2 0.2
44 5 0.5
45 0 0.0
46 3 0.3
47 5 0.5
48 5 0.5
49 4 0.4
50 2 0.2
51 7 0.6
52 13 1.2
53 11 1.0
54 24 2.2
55 33 3.0
56 24 2.2
57 27 2.5
58 40 3.6
59 34 3.1
60 37 3.4
61 25 2.3
62 46 4.2
63 30 2.7
64 19 1.7
65 21 1.9
66 23 2.1
67 18 1.6
68 27 2.5
69 31 2.8
70 32 2.9
71 28 2.5
72 33 3.0
73 22 2.0
74 16 1.5
75 23 2.1
76 36 3.3
77 30 2.7
78 20 1.8
79 16 1.5
80 8 0.7
81 6 0.5
82 9 0.8
83 11 1.0
84 10 0.9
85 3 0.3
86 13 1.2
87 10 0.9
88 6 0.5
89 7 0.6
90 9 0.8
91 9 0.8
92 9 0.8
93 7 0.6
94 5 0.5
95 9 0.8
96 10 0.9
97 7 0.6
98 8 0.7
99 4 0.4
U.S. Call Areas Worked
Area QSOs Pct
--------------------
0 117 10.6
1 93 8.5
2 95 8.6
3 98 8.9
4 136 12.4
5 93 8.5
6 125 11.4
7 116 10.6
8 69 6.3
9 105 9.6
--------------------
Total 1047 95.3
Sweepstakes Precedents
Precedent QSOs Pct
----------------------
A 479 43.6
B 227 20.7
Q 90 8.2
M 34 3.1
U 264 24.0
S 5 0.5
1 comment:
Great work, Gordon, and a very nice write-up. Thanks!
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