P40L-P49Y Contest Summary Information

I’m very happy to have been able to operate this contest and had a lot of fun doing so. The CA cyclone hit just as I was leaving for the airport the prior Sunday, dropping numerous large trees and power lines across our mountain roads, particularly the two roads that would allow a vehicle to get from our property to the airport. Missing my flight, I resigned myself to missing the contest as we planned to get the roads cleared and to deal with a potentially prolonged power outage. However, by Monday night Mary and I thought I could take a Tuesday night redeye, getting here Wednesday afternoon for a quick setup for the contest.

I love the steady stream of prefix multipliers right up to the end of WPX contests. At any point, a multiplier can show up and it’s an ongoing challenge to work them out of the band map. Plus, the WPX scoring has the score exponentially increasing throughout the contest. Very motivating!

I had a number of technical difficulties to navigate through the weekend, a couple of which caused some very ill-timed off-times, but the operating pleasure was worth it. This score is one of my lowest ever, but that doesn’t detract from the 30+ hours of radiosport fun!

As for conditions, they seemed great overall but at the same time, signal levels were weak here. A number of QSO partners were buried in the noise and some were inaudible in the headphones, yet printing fine on the screen. I struggled with rate on the low bands and the high band rates were reduced due to the 10- and 15-meter Yagis being stuck north, sub-optimal for Europe and Asia/west coast NA.

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):

K4D/K-Pod (x2), K3S/P3, Alpha 91B, ACOM 2000A and Alpha 86A, FilterMax low-
power BPFs, high-power BPFs, SixPak (x2), StackMatch (x2), Green Heron
rotor controllers (x3), RigSelect PRO

Networked ThinkPad X220s (x3, one for each radio):
     WriteLog 12.77B
     MMTTY 1.70K (x2)
     2Tone 21.03a encoder/decoders (x4)
     Mortty 2.0 with modified TinyFSK 1.1.0 sketch

Tower 1: 65’ with 2-element shorty-forty, 4-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 6-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