P40L-P49Y Contest Summary Information

Roger, N4RR, and I had a great time taking turns running 3BSIQ in the M2 category. The station played well, and the ops did “OK”. On the other hand, local band conditions were mediocre.

High solar activity often has a downside here in Aruba. Signals were weak and watery Friday night and at other times. Typically, I can make 800+ QSOs in the first 4 hours, but not in these conditions. Sunday’s solar environment was particularly subdued. Mid-day, 20m had no signals,15m signals were in the noise floor, and 10m was even weaker. I had to engage a pre-amp on 15m as well as 10m to get enough audio to drive the decoders. All this provided the “opportunity” to learn how to deal with challenging propagation.

Roger showed up with a severe cold and fortunately I haven’t caught it yet. Kudos to him for hanging tough and pulling his full weight throughout the preparations and contest. Since there were only two of us, we opted to operate separately to maximize sleep for each. That also minimized my exposure to his cold!

I set up three K3/P3 rigs in tight proximity so one operator could readily access all with little movement. The configuration is networked PCs/UIs on each radio. The keyboards are full size without the number pad, so they fit easily in front of each radio along with a Kpod tuning knob and mouse. Unfortunately, I use a left-hand mouse on the left radio and right-hand mouse on the right to minimize the clutter in front of me. Roger hasn’t practiced ambidextrous mouse operation so we had to change the left/right mouse parameter each time we changed ops. I hadn’t thought of that ahead of time and it was too late to devise a better solution.

I deploy KD6X’s RigSelect PRO to instantly move the headphones to any pair of the 3 radios, by tapping one button on the front panel. The firmware has a versatile audio mixing scheme that allows another button to mix in the audio from the third radio to one of the main 2BSIQ radios at any time. Finally, what I think is the most beneficial feature, is Courtney’s method of audio isolation eliminates any hum/noise from ground loops. Reverand Brown, K9YC, would very much approve of this design. This is the first experience I’ve had with connecting a lot of audio cables between several radios without any audio artifacts.

This setup provides excellent flexibility to monitor and instantly move between three primary bands at any time. Multipliers can be picked off on the third band, subject to the band change rule. Problems can be mitigated such as when a neighborhood noise source suddenly appeared on 15m Sunday night, wiping out any copy at all. We tapped one button the RigSelect and were instantly running on 40m instead.

Thanks to all the stations that moved for us. We failed miserably at collecting mults. It was probably a combination of our band conditions and station multiplier capability. Many NA and EU single-ops with fewer QSOs have more mults which may support the difference in band conditions. After the contest, we heard from a NA operator that EU was much stronger than us on the high bands. It’s not always great down here!

As competitive Multi-Two goes, ours lacked today’s necessary in-band capability and additional operators to chase multipliers. While we’ve done some in-band in CW and SSB multi-ops, it is rather complex to set up here and more than I wanted to tackle this trip. That surely would have increased our poor multiplier totals, but unlikely to compensate for our band conditions.

Roger has been using N1MM in recent years and had to re-familiarize with WriteLog. He was also very skilled at crashing it and we never could figure out how that happened. I have never experienced any of these crashes in 2 decades with the logger. I wish we understood the triggers so it could be reported to W5XD.

Dividing the M2 operating between two ops who alternately run both radios, while the other op rests, gets more attractive as I age. We were able to dynamically trade-off operating and sleep/eating/etc. Both could operate at peak times, but at a minimum, each is responsible for only 24 of the 48 hours. Sort of like Classic Overlay but without the restrictions of single radio and no Assistance.

I thought it would be great to not have the SO2R radio interlock but discovered in practice that it is hard to take advantage of that after many years of developing skill at managing the interlock. Ideally, I would operate as if separate operators were running each radio which should increase the run rate. Not so easy, as my brain is now hard-wired to wait for the other radio to finish transmitting. Another skill to build and while I made progress this weekend, I often left a lot of unnecessary deadtime when radios could have been transmitting. Conversely, now I wonder if doing this type of M2 will sabotage the SO2R timing skill I’ve built over the years. In any case, I enjoy new challenges.

It was fun chasing the other M2 stations, especially our friends at K9CT and NJ4P. Roger is a frequent operator at Craig’s FB station for CW and RTTY contests. Ron, WV4P, and wife Trina, NR4L, have rapidly built the super competitive remote station NJ4P in rural Tennessee. Just as impressive, they’ve ascended the contest operating-skill curve faster than I’ve ever seen.

Perhaps the biggest satisfaction for me was the excellent work-around we had for the inter-station RFI that has rendered 2BSIQ and multi-op very compromised at this location. Right under our close-spaced towers, on a city lot, is the next-door church’s huge metal roof with countless diode junctions from all the fasteners. We hypothesize our transmit signals are being re-radiated on harmonic bands. The result is wide-band RFI that raises the noise floor up to 20dB at times, making it impossible to copy any but the very few super strong signals.

The work-around was a simple wire fan dipole for 80/40, located on a temporary 42’ SpiderPole about 350’ from the towers/church. By transmitting on this antenna, there is ZERO RFI on the harmonic bands. As expected, there is the actual harmonic but without the other RFI, we could operate up to 5 kHz away. We added that coax to our switching system of StackMatches and SixPaks so that we transmitted on 80 with it when we were also on 40 and used it on 40 when also on 20. Operationally, we simply avoided being on 20 and 10 at the same time.

The surprising finding was that the RBN reports show it down only 1-2 dB compared to our main 80m Inverted-Vee at 60’. On 40m we are only down 4-6 dB compared to the 2-element Yagi at 80’. This is a very acceptable trade-off for eliminating the pesky RFI. Thanks to John W6LD and Chad WE9V who first Beta-tested this solution at 32’ in February 2024.

The station capability was much better in 2025, but P4 band conditions were much poorer. It seems that many years when east-west propagation is great, P4 experiences mediocre conditions. That seems to be the case this year from both the scores and commentary from NA and EU stations. Perhaps NA and EU are having such a great time, they forget us southern folks!

I continue to appreciate using this modest station, albeit in a pretty fine location, initiated by the late Carl Cook AI6V/P40V and now owned by Andy AE6Y/P49Y and John W6LD/P40L.

73,

Ed, P49X (W0YK)

  Here is the P49X Multi-Two history:
Year	Score	QSOs  Zones	DXCC W/VE Operators
2011	14.2M	6,376	132	383	264	N4RR, K6AW, W6OTC, W0YK
2012	12.5M	5,803	133	358	270	W6OTC, W0YK
2013	11.6M	5,405	129	345	268	W6OTC, W0YK
2025	10.2M	4,668	121	353	261	N4RR, W0YK
2009	 8.4M	4,378	105	320	223	K4AW, W6OTC, W0YK

Station detail (on a small suburban lot):
     -K3S/P3 (x3) with RigSelect PRO for headphone audio steering/mixing
     -KPA-1500, Acom 2000A, Alpha 86A
     -low-power BPFs, high-power BPFs, SixPak (x2), StackMatch (x2) Green Heron rotor
       controllers (x3)

Networked Win10 ThinkPad X220s (x3, one for each radio), each with: 
     - WriteLog 12.90E - MMTTY 1.70K (x2) 
     - 2Tone 25.02b decoders (x4) 
     - Mortty 2.0 with modified TinyFSK 1.1.0 sketch (shared on main & sub-RX) 


Tower 1: 66’ with 2-element shorty-forty and 5-el 20m Yagi at 68’; SteppIR at 35’
 fixed north-south; 80m Inverted-V, 2-el at 65’; and double-L vertical for 160m at 65’
Tower 2: 65’ with single boom interlaced 5-el 15m and 5-el 10m Yagi 
Tower 3: 45’ with JK Mid-Tri tribander 
SpiderPole: 42’ with fan dipole for 80m and 40m, Inverted-Vees fed by single coax
Beverages (x4): West US, East US, Europe, un-terminated Africa/VK/ZL on K9AY switch
(SpiderPole and Beverages located in the Cunucu open space behind the property.)