P40L-P49Y Contest Summary Information

October 2010 CQWW DX SSB Contest P49Y Multi-Single

Andrew L. Faber, AE6Y, P49Y [Scott Redd, K0DQ, notes in italics]
11/12/10 Public ver.

Tuesday, October 26 – Wednesday, October 27, 2010. I’m now watching the Giants-Ranger game in the World Series at the cottage (apparently we get ESPN on our cable, who knew?) at 10:30 p.m. having returned from dinner with Scott Redd, K0DQ, at the Radisson, where we enjoyed hamburgers at the open air bar/restaurant and watched the game. It’s really fun as a SF Giants fan; in the seventh inning, an aged Tony Bennett is singing "God Bless America" instead of "I left my Heart in San Francisco," and the crowd is enjoying the lead. Scott and his wife Donna, and the other admiral, Ed, and his wife Cindy are staying there. I took my usual AA red-eye to MIA. They keep juggling the schedule, so that on different trips the same flight has left at various times, as late as 11:55 p.m. on my most recent trip in May; this time it left SFO at 8:30, so I ended up with a six-hour layover at the Admiral’s Club in MIA and arrived in Aruba at 1:30 p.m. They’ve actually opened a new Club in MIA, so there are now three. Caught up on sleep, read the Win-Test manual, had breakfast, thought about multi-operating, read newspapers, etc.

I picked up my Hertz Nissan Tiida, and was at the cottage by 2 p.m. The temp was about 88 degrees with reasonable humidity, so actually rather pleasant. The house was in good shape. Chris had replaced the compressor in the living room air conditioner, so it was now working. I set up the K3 and P3 that I had brought down in the left radio position to be used as the run radio. Unfortunately, the Pro2 that was in the right radio position was weak on receive. It seemed to function completely normally except that the front end had very low gain. It wasn’t dead as it had been earlier in the year before I had brought it back and had Icom repair it, but it clearly wasn’t up to snuff. The other Pro2 seemed to have a transmit audio problem, in that it would periodically lose output as the ALC meter would pin to the right. So I put it away and dragged out our trusty FT1000D to use as the mult radio [Note that on Monday, the second Pro2 seemed to resolve its problem after being turned on for an hour so – maybe it had cobwebs that needed to be burned off].

All antennas seemed to be working OK. Towards the end of the day, I went out in the cunucu and hooked up the lower end of the 160 C-dipole to the white rope on a thorn tree. The cunucu is pretty overgrown, and walking in the 2-foot tall grass is treacherous from hidden branches, old junk and debris, etc. This time, instead of wearing blue jeans as normally, I had brought down a pair of hardware-store work pants with heavy fabric and lots of pockets; I left them in the closet in the second bedroom along with my Tevas and hiking boots.

Scott came over at about 3:30 p.m., and we worked together for the next four hours. We removed the love seat and set up the mult station with the FT-1000D and Titan RF deck on the white table under the window, pushed all the way to the far wall. Having been well coached by N6TV, Scott first devoted himself to the computer network. We are using my laptop as the RUN computer, one of his as the MULT computer and an extra one he brought as a spare, called SPOT1. This one we set up on the other card table, and it was handy when it worked for allowing the non-operating guys to check on progress.

Ed, W0YK, had left the modem and router on the floor of the radio room hooked up to the DSL jack in the front bedroom with a shielded phone cable. We left it that way, but hooked up each computer with a cat-5 cable from the router. After some fussing and email assistance from Ed, John, and TV-Bob, we ended up using it as a wired network. [See notes at the end of this write-up for network info.]

I had the Heil headset plugged into our DXDoubler. Audio from the laptop headphone jack went through the W2IHY iBox to the DVK input on the DXD. Two serial ports from the double USB-serial cable, were set in WT to trigger on PTT, and then RCA cables ran into the Mic/DVK and the Foot Switch jacks on the DXD. Normal rig control went through another port using the ByteRunner USB/serial convertor. All worked flawlessly. Both Scott and I also used VOX on the K3.

Scott and I ran the amps through the various antennas and all worked fine. There was very little interference. In fact, during the contest we experienced virtually no inter-station interference; hearing the other operator talking (sometimes loudly) into his mic was distracting at first, but easily tuned out by our internal mental filters. As usual, the Titan could deal with higher SWRs than the Alpha 86. This meant, for example that on 80, the usable range for the run radio was from about 3670 to 3775 kHz, switching from Lo to Hi at 3720; for the mult radio the range was from about 3635 to 3785 kHz, switching at 3700. Similarly on 40 the Titan would load our 2 el beam at least up to 7250 kHz, while the Alpha required the use of the MFJ 989C tuner above about 7100. In practice, we ran the run station through the tuner in bypass mode, except when needed for 40 above 7100. Tuning of the Alpha and the MFJ on 40 was very easy and non-critical.

We noticed that 10m was wide open all across the US – this definitely could have been fun if these conditions held up [of course, they didn’t]. John Crovelli called twice about dinner, but unfortunately we were wearing headphones and didn’t hear the phone ring, and when we got his messages he had already left.

Thursday, October 28, 2010. Slept like a log from 11:30 till about 7:30, then woke up feeling a bit logy and out of sorts. Went shopping at Ling and Sons for groceries and contest food, then came back, and a pot of coffee and a bowl of Zucaritas (Frosted Flakes, my Aruba vice) helped perk me up.

The cottage hosted lots of visitors today. John Crovelli came by at about one to chat for a while, and we shared some cookies and soda. As usual, he’s doing lots of outside work rebuilding his beverages and Vee-beams. JP arrived at about two, and he and I played radio for a few hours. For a while he was running on 10 on the mult radio and I on 15 on the run radio, to test out interference, logging with WT, etc. [For future QSLing purposes, note that these contacts weren't logged. Actually some were, but they are in a WT file along with lots of sample contacts entered for software testing purposes, so I’m not retaining those logs, but will answer QSLs received that look genuine.] In the morning, I found that Scott’s MULT computer had died. I found a power supply for it, then experimented getting the network going, and finally did so to my great relief. His serial cable wasn’t allowing radio polling, but a suggestion by email from W0YK helped out – it turned out it needed to be configured to have DTR Off, but RTS in Handshake mode; my serial rig control cable for the K3, OTOH, needed both DTR and RTS set Off.

Our next visitors were Robert, W5AJ, and Bill, KE5OG. They were staying at Carl’s place (P49V) and planned to operate as two single-band efforts, Robert as P40P, 20m HP, and Bill as P40B, 40m LP. I can’t imagine doing 40m low power in this contest with its incredible QRM, but Bill was planning to give it a try. Robert had operated before from our house, but hadn’t been to Aruba in eight years.

Scott arrived at around five and we all worked together until about 7:30. We decided to allow switching of the C31 between radios, so that the mult radio can have a separately rotatable antenna when needed. This wasn't implemented in an ideal manner, but actually worked with no problems in the contest. We ran the C31 cable into the Common position on the 4-position manual coax switch on the table leg. Then the number one output (i.e., the UP position on the switch) went into the StackMatch for normal operation of the C31 by the run radio. The number four output (DOWN position) was connected to a cable that we taped to the bottom of the desk, running over to the Titan. So the mult operator had to move the switch, and manually unplug the SixPak coax from the Titan and plug in the C31 coax to make the changeover. A second coax switch would have made it a bit easier. This is particularly useful when the run station is running while beaming North on 40, and the mult station is looking for Pacific mults on 20, or when the two stations are on 10 and 15 during the day (provided the run station doesn’t need both the monobander and the C31 to split power in two directions).

We spent about half an hour discussing and finalizing an operating schedule. I had started one on an Excel spreadsheet, and it’s a good thing we had it on the computer, as we made lots of starts and restarts until we finally came up with a good schedule. We decided that we’d simply have two teams, JP and I on Team 1 and Ed and Scott on Team 2. To allow better sleep time, we didn’t want to do four-hour shifts exclusively, particularly since Ed and Scott planned to return to their hotel to sleep. We ultimately decided on a schedule that worked very well, combining 4 and 6 hour shifts that alternated the various operating hours for the teams (having an odd number of shifts in 24 hours accomplishes that effect, as Scott noted – “dogging the watch” in Navy terms). We agreed that Team 1 would have a six-hour shift at the start of the contest, then Team 2 would have a similar shift. Then there would be three four-hour shifts, ending the first day. Then two more six-hour shifts and three more four-hour shifts for the second day. We did follow this to the letter, except that we got thrown off on Sunday due to our three-hour power failure (see below)

The five Americans met for dinner at the Radisson and ended up in the same restaurant, again watching the ball game.

Friday, October 29, 2010. I woke up a little before eight intending to go running, but my back has been bothering me a bit, and I decide that the better part of valor was to skip it for this trip (though I did miss my usual runs at Savaneta and the swims thereafter in the little cove near Marina Pirata).

I reestablished the network, and everything was working fine. We have the run station on the K3LR packet node, and the mult station on K1EA, and both seem to be feeding spots across the network. It took me an hour of fairly frustrating effort to get this all done, even though in retrospect it’s pretty simple. I then spent some time refining our operating schedule sheet; Microsoft kept insisting on reformatting some of my cells over my objections but eventually got beaten into submission. Also produced two pages of Operating Notes to summarize some of the procedures we have agreed upon, such as the use of the tuner on 40, the 80m antenna limits, use of the C31, etc. Having our printer available is very handy for such purposes. I also produce a Titan tuning chart to replace the existing one, which is for CW.

Chris called at about noon, having received a call from Ken Lovell at the DTZ about an interference complaint he had received from someone some distance down the road. This is the first such complaint we have received since making our peace with the church next door years ago. Ken seemed somewhat skeptical due to the distance of the neighbor. He agreed that it should be dealt with in November by John’s team of operators, and ended up wishing me a successful contest.

I played radio a bit and noticed that 10 is noticeably less open than it had been. I heard a few EUs at about one p.m. local time, then got a US opening at about three [unfortunately, this same situation prevailed in the contest, and the EU opening was even weaker or nonexistent]. Scott and Ed came by at about 4:30, Ed having just arrived. He had a huge learning curve on the radios, the software, the antenna switching, etc. But he soaked it all up eagerly and was enthusiastic about jumping into the fray. JP arrived, I had a little to eat, Scott and Ed left, and we were ready for the 8 p.m. local time start of the contest.

Contest Notes, 2010 CQWW DX SSB Multi-Single (more or less as dictated during the contest). A miserable start, at least on the run radio. I’d hoped to start on 15, or failing that to get a few hours in on 20 before entering the QRM zoo on 40, but 15 was completely dead. 20 wasn’t dead, but literally no one answered CQs for 5 or 6 minutes, so I end up working a few SA stations, then have to switch to 40. I spend about an hour and a half on 7060 running EU, but it’s very difficult with a great deal of QRM. Also, as always many of the EUs have distorted, over-processed audio which makes them very hard to understand. As I’ve noted before, the big exception is the G’s, who generally are very clear. JP is mult hunting on the high bands. I dare a half hour on 7025, which is much quieter, but am eventually chased off by intentional jamming from CW operators defending their turf.

Much more successful is going into the American phone band and running US stations simplex. Actually, unlike former years, I did no split operation at all, but simply QSY’d above 7150 to work the US with much better rates. In fact, I spend almost three hours there on 7210 and 7248 (thanks to the tuner), while JP has a blast mult hunting on 80. I move to 80 at 0503Z, by which time JP has worked something like 11 zones and 56 countries on 80 in about the same number of contacts. Meanwhile I also have worked 55 countries by running on 40 (though it took me 800 or so QSOs). For the last hour of our stint I work mostly US but also some EU and others on 80. The noise level is a bit higher than on 40, but we seem to get out well on 80 [Clearly our new rotatable dipole works very well. John Fore said we were the loudest of the Caribs on 80, and I note that we ended up with 97 countries on that band; amazingly that is two more than the multi-multi at PJ2T got]. Scott and Ed arrive a bit before 0600Z and make a pot of coffee, then we pass the baton to them.

I have a sandwich then go to bed, wearing earplugs because it’s pretty noisy next door. Before I get out of bed about five hours later, I can hear Scott’s rate improve significantly, from which I deduce that he has managed to move to 20. I believe that Ed started off running on the low bands, then they switched (and later Scott appeared to do all the high band running). Scott is very crisp and efficient (and loud – he calls it “motivational speaking”) and obviously is a “rate junkie,” as I also have become after years of Aruban contesting. Team 2 has also been productive, and I note that at 1147Z we are at 160: 13/11/5, 80: 462/70/22, 40: 893/95/25, 20: 209/55/16, 15: 8/7/8, 10: 4/3/4. Total: 1589/241/80.

My next shift is 8 a.m. to noon local time. Scott had started running on 15 and I stay on that band for the entire four hours mostly working EUs, with some US. Meanwhile JP seeks mults on 20. Scott had left me on 21375 kHz, but after about 40 minutes I find the hunting better below the US phone band, and stay on 21149 for more than two hours. I’m a bit disappointed in the average rate of about 170/hour, but it’s tough work with lots of QRM and many weak signals.

In my four-hour break, I decide to get out of the house, so I drive around for a while, noting that San Nicholas seems to have turned into a ghost town with the closing of the Valero refinery. I get a cuppa joe and a doughnut at the Dunkin Donuts in Savaneta and relax for a while reading "Martin Eden" on my iPhone. Back at the house, Scott has been on 15 and 20. A bit after 1900Z (3 p.m. local) Ed says that 10 is starting to open up pretty well, which is consistent with what I noticed yesterday. We urge Scott to go there, which he does at 1910Z. Scott has a great 1900 hour of 328 Qs on 15 and 10, with a peak of 357 ending at 1950z.

For our shift from 2000Z to 2400Z, I start out taking over Scott’s run on 10. I have a good hour and three-quarters, but I can feel the propagation searchlight narrowing, and eventually it seems almost restricted to the Southeast US and SA, so I decide to leave 10 at 2147Z. I was going to 15, but JP wisely suggests 20, since we have many fewer contacts there, and he needs the opportunity to do some dxing on 15. 20 is great for a while, with rates over 300/hour, but it starts to peter out and seems to run into a wall at about 2330Z (which is why we had to start the contest on 40 instead of 20). So at the half-way point, I am delighted to give Scott back the low bands, with about 4200 QSOs in the log.

JP goes home to eat and get some sleep. I have a sandwich and turn on the World Series game in progress on ESPN. The picture is very good, with no TVI at all from the radios. I go to bed at around 9:20 p.m. local, with the Giants losing 4 to 1, and wake up at about 1:25 a.m. to get ready for the 2 a.m. handover. I can hear that Scott has been running all night and we're now at some 4800 contacts. The tropical storm seems to have arrived, as it's raining cats and dogs and quite windy outside. JP and I put in our six hours on the graveyard shift, upping the total to about 5500 QSOs. I spend most of my run time on 40 and 80, though also almost an hour on 160.

Scott and Ed relieve us at 8 a.m., and about five minutes later. . . the power goes off! I call Chris, who does have power at her house in Jan Flemming, and she calls Elmar (the power company), which verifies that it's an outage only in our Sabana Basora area. Scott, Ed and I hang out in the living room, chatting about geopolitics for about an hour, then we separate for naps. The power comes back on at about 10:45 local time, we plug everything back in, and Scott and Ed go back to work.

JP arrives at about 11:30 for our shift, which was to be from noon to 4 p.m. I make a proposal that we simply divvy up the remaining time so that Scott and Ed will carry on until 3:30 p.m., and then JP and I will run out the contest for the last four and a half hours. Everyone agrees. I go back to sleep for an hour, then at about 1:30 I take a drive off to the McDonald's in Santa Cruz, of all places, and have part of a hamburger and a few fries and read some more of "Martin Eden" on my iPhone. It's really beautiful writing.

Scott leaves me a great frequency on 15 at 3:30 (1930Z), and I milk it for quite a while as it gradually grows less and less crowded in the neighborhood. We have a combined 338 hour in the 1900-2000Z hour -- how's that for teamwork? I move to 20 with about two hours to go. There's more QRM, but it gradually clears out, then, as it did yesterday, 20 starts to die in the last half hour of the contest. JP keeps working mults right up to the end. Our two teams collectively average 239 QSOs per hour for the last nine hours of the contest.

After a quick shower and shave, it's off to Tony Roma's for a very pleasant post-contest dinner. TR's was much less busy than in previous years; in fact, by the time we left at 11 p.m., we were just about closing down the place; it used to be so crowded at 9 p.m. that we would have to wait for a table. It was a very convivial meal (see below for the attendees) with Scott and John Crovelli trading jabs at each other and everyone enjoying some meat and beer. I drove JP there and back, and upon my return home at 11:30, John Fore called excitedly to say that PJ4X on Bonaire had just posted their score and it was a little below ours. This was surprising, since he had been listening to them at home and noted their immense pileups as a new DXCC marker.

Monday, November 1, 2010. Well, here's a difference: after a single operator contest I typically go to bed at midnight and wake up at 10 a.m., never having moved once all night, but today I woke up refreshed at seven. I made a pot of coffee and spent about an hour and a half taking everything apart, putting away the FT-1000, repacking the K3 and P3, etc. I did some log editing, including cleaning the log of QSOs where the operator had signaled an error by entering P49Y as the callsign. This also allowed me to delete a QSO erroneously logged before the start of the contest.

After writing up and posting the 3830 report on our effort, I visited with JP, Chris and Cindy (Andy being at school) for about an hour. We discussed some deferred maintenance items on the house, and Chris agreed to write up a list to discuss with John in November. Returning to the house, I noticed that the sky was darkening, even though it was only 1 p.m., so it was a good time to venture out into the cunucu to roll up the lower leg of the 160 C-dipole, which I left tied to the tower as usual (with the eyebolt in the proper hole on the inside of the back wall about 8 feet from the tower). To reinstall it, connect the end of the wire to the white rope coiled up in the thorn bush and tension it with the black rope through the eyebolt. Raindrops were falling as I came in, and it rained off and on for a while.

After a quick sandwich, I checked out the two Pro2s. The one with the intermittent audio problem seemed, after about a ten minute warm-up, to be working fine, and I had a nice chat with it with VE9AA/m, whom I had worked in the contest. The other one still has the receive problem, acting as though there is very low front end gain. This is the same one that Icom had fixed earlier in the year for a completely dead front end. It needs to be brought back for repairs. I disconnected all antennas and packed up my gear, this time taking the P3 back in the computer bag, since I no longer needed the various documents that I had been reading on the way down.

It's 9:30 p.m., and I just returned from dinner with Scott and Ed and Donna and Cindy at the Wacky Wahoo, a "hole in the wall" restaurant not far from the McD's in the high rise area, which they had visited before and claimed to be an outstanding fish restaurant. It was a very gemutlich dinner, and I enjoyed the chance to chat with Cindy and Donna. Four of us had the special: kingfish with a curry sauce on rice served with Aruban flatbread and vegetables, and it was excellent. On the way back to the house, I was witness to an amazing display of lightning to the east and north, in fact, I even stopped the car at Frenchman's Pass for a while to marvel at it. It wasn't overcast, but there were low clouds on the horizon, then open sky above with higher puffy white clouds. The lightning would flash behind the low clouds, thus brightening the sky and darkening the white clouds in an instant reversal of contrast. There was no thunder, and not much actual lightning to be seen, just the wonderful effects. Sort of looked like distant aerial bombardments in a war movie. It was a visually stunning display.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010. Up at 5 a.m. for my 7:55 flight to MIA. No problems and home by 8:30 p.m. Talked to Tom (8P5A) and Kathy on the plane. They had suffered the effects of tropical storm Tomas on Barbados, losing power after seven hours and never getting it back -- making our three-hour power failure seem trivial.

Notes on Win-Test and Networking

Contrary to the Win-Test manual which says to assign fixed IP addresses to each of the computers, the magic formula seemed to be to allow the router to assign IP addresses (set in Control Panel/Network Connections/Local Area Networks/Internet Protocol Version 4/Properties/ CHECK “Obtain an IP address automatically”). Once that’s done, go into Win-Test to Options/Configure interfaces/Ethernet/CHECK “Enable Ethernet network”/ CHECK “By default box” under Broadcast address. Write down the resulting IP address (e.g. 192.168.201.255) and leave the default Port 9871 set. Note that this Broadcast address must be the same on all computers on the network (and, since they’re on the same network, checking the “by Default” box on each should yield the same broadcast address).

To get packet spots, open the wtDxTelnet program, go to Options/ Wintest network properties and paste the default IP address from Win-Test (192.168.201.255 in this example) and the Default Port 9871 in the appropriate boxes. Note that the IP address must be the same as in Win-Test. It is reportedly possible to have multiple DX Clusters in parallel, but we had some difficulties. It appears each different cluster (e.g. K1EA, W3LPL) must be opened in wtDxTelnet on a separate computer and broadcast over the network. Supposedly, you can open multiple copies of wtDxTelnet on the same computer and set them to different clusters, but that didn't seem to work for us. All seemed to reset to the latest cluster selected.

Physical Network summary: Shielded cable from DSL jack in front bedroom to modem on floor of radio room. That is connected to the Frostholm wifi router on the floor. Hardwired orange LAN cables from the router to the three computers. These are about 15-feet long, and were brought by Scott, who also brought a much longer (maybe 50-feet long and maybe shielded), blue, cat-5 cable that wasn't used. All cables were left in the shack.

During the contest when we lost the network a few times, I found that opening the Options/Configure Interfaces and simply clicking OK would restart it. We also occasionally had the Announcements window in WT lose all spots. In that case going to wtDxTelnet and disconnecting then connecting to the cluster restored normal operation. We had no other problems with WT. One nice feature that I appreciated is that when you record voice messages on the soundcard using Shift-Fx, WT also makes several other audio files that are the same message at slower and faster speeds, and you can access them by pressing ALT-F9, -F10.