P40L-P49Y Contest Summary Information

Band conditions were nice enough all weekend, making for a very enjoyable contest here in Aruba. The station was flawless with the one and only issue being self-inflicted. As a bonus, our long-term persistent inter-station RFI was tolerable throughout, such that I could run any two bands without too much compromise.

I started on 20 and 40 even though 15 was still open. I wanted to move to 80 ASAP to maximize the 2x QSO points. Friday night, the bands were “subdued” with muted signals but not too much noise. While running 2BSIQ on 40 and 20, I was monitoring 80 on the third radio, waiting for activity to rise. Eventually, I realized something was wrong as there where only traces of a very few big signals. When I switched the receiver to the transmit antenna, suddenly the band was hopping. Oops! Something amiss with the Beverage system. That was serious enough that I took an hour break (not the greatest move during the first few contest hours) to trouble shoot. I finally gave up and put a splitter on the other side of the Beverage system and shared it with both sides. Doable but not ideal. When I took my first planned sleep break after the EU low-band opening Saturday morning, I discovered my unforced error. I had enabled the UNUSED Beverage terminals rather than the ones that had antennas connected. Geeez!

Well, that was a bummer. I had the hourly stats of my 2017 all-time best effort in this contest posted in front of me and was well-behind the first night. I’m not sure the Beverage fiasco accounts for all of that. This situation energized me to really push and try to make up some ground although the bar of my 2017 effort was pretty high.

10, 15 and 20 were “OK” Saturday, but the rates were less than I needed. They were good, but not spectacular, into both EU and NA with other parts of the world calling in despite the north-oriented Yagis. It was difficult to keep the 60-minute rate around 140-160/hour, let alone get some 200+ hours in. There just wasn’t enough incoming rate, plus the serial number exchange would require top ops in every QSO. I maintained the negative delta from Friday night, though.

The 2017 Sunday high-band rate was outstanding and it was doubtful it would be that way this weekend. But contesters still dream, and I was eager to see if we’d be lucky. My luck came early in a very unexpected form. The low bands Saturday night were amazing here! 40 and 80 sounded like good 20 meter conditions. Very quiet with excellent QSO rates and plenty of activity. This was combined with zero interstation RFI from 80 into 40. I tossed by sleep plan and ran both bands until EU thinned out at 3 a.m. local (07z). That resulted in just one REM cycle of sleep before getting up for breakfast and diving into 10 at 15 at daybreak.

The Sunday high bands were about the same as Saturday and certainly didn’t produce the 2017 rates. I was happy to get to 3,500 but I needed another 300 Qs on 80 plus a bit more on 10 and 15, in order to make my scores back in 2013-2017. At least I rebounded from last year’s dismal performance.

There has been a lot of rain here, uncharacteristically, since the first of the year. It stopped Friday and didn’t occur all weekend. Maybe that helped the interstation RFI which was virtually gone all week … until dusk on Friday as we started the contest. 40 was hammering 20 pretty bad, but I found some optimum spot on each band that minimized the effect and was able to get by with the louder stations breaking through the raised noise floor. For weaker stations, I had to carefully time and stop transmitting on 40 to get the serial numbers of many stations on 20. 80 wasn’t too bad on 40. Without the rain, I assumed Saturday night would be worse, but to my surprise the 40 to 20 RFI was barely detectable on the band scope and had no effect on my operating. 80 to 40 was nonexistent. A very frustrating problem.

As always, thanks to all my QSO partners and Andy, P49Y/AE6Y, and John, P40L/W6LD, for sharing the cottage station here.

73,

Ed P49X (W0YK)

  
Station detail (on a small suburban lot):

K3S/P3 (x3) with RigSelect PRO for headphone audio steering/mixing 
KPA-1500 and Alpha 86A (x2) 
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 12.86B - 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: 80’ with 2-element shorty-forty, 5-el 20m Yagi, 80m Inverted-V, 2-el SteppIR 
at 35’ due north/south and double-L vertical for 160m 
Tower 2: 55’ with single boom interlaced 5-el 15m and 5-el 10m Yagi 
Tower 3: 45’ with JK Mid-Tri tribander 
Beverages (x4): West US, East US, Europe, un-terminated Africa/VK/ZL on K9AY switch