P40L-P49Y Contest Summary Information

Comments:

The first 2 hours were a QSO-rate rush. They are at the top of all the “first 2 hours” in two+ decades of P49X RU; plus, I had my all-time best RU first clock-hour. This, despite taking a couple minutes away from operating at the start to recover the SCP file path so that calls would highlight to provide automatic grabbing without the mouse. This path was lost several more times in all 3 computers which I’ve never seen before and don’t know the cause.

The last 18 hours were reminiscent of the Sunday afternoon “SS doldrums”. Overall, out of 20 RTTY Roundups from 2005-2026 (22 years with the 2021 and 2022 Covid years missing) as P49X, this was my third lowest raw score. So much for incremental improvement. It was painfully slow. To be fair, the RU rate has always dropped off, but never so fast. This is common with most 24+ hour contests. More participants are needed and the trend is mostly the other direction.

Conditions were similarly subdued as the 2025 WW RTTY contest. Many signals were down in the noise floor. Some signals were inaudible in the headphones. A memorable example was a QSO at the very end of Sunday. Kent, KH6CJJ, called in and I nearly missed him if it were not for the bright yellow highlighting of the call in the Rttyrite window. It was a new multiplier because I had zero copy on all the KH6s found during the contest. Between the MMTTY plus three 2Tone decoders, the screen print was solid enough to make the contact.

Sunday morning, I wondered if I’d be on 40 and 20 all day as 10 and 15 were totally blacked out. I kept checking, though, and by nearly noon local time, they started coming back. There were short spurts where these high bands seemed to come alive, but mostly they were very weak.

Compounding the low participation and poor band conditions, there were two failures that interrupted the operating flow for nearly an hour total. Late Saturday afternoon, messages weren’t triggering the radio and being sent. Keyboard strokes weren’t flowing to the computer. I frantically removed and re-paired the keyboard to no avail. I tried other keyboards, nada. During my sleep break, I discovered that rebooting Windows 11 solved the problem. One of my “duh!” moments, because we all know that OS re-booting often mysteriously fixes all manner of issues like this.

While troubleshooting this keyboard problem during my 24-hour operating period, I discovered that the Acom amp on one of the other networked PC/radio sets was off. It kept turning off after its 2.5-minute warm-up cycle with a zero bias error message. So, now I had two of my three radios down and had to stop operating to fix. I re-cabled the amp from the keyboard-disabled radio over to the radio with the failed Acom. Unfortunately, it was a manually-tuned Alpha 86 that slowed down band changes, which were now going to be more prevalent with just two radios. In the end, the lost time wasn’t as debilitating as my rattled nerves from all this distraction. Once settled back into the fun of operating, albeit at a low rate, all this was mostly ignored.

I must keep reminding myself how much worse this weekend’s experience could have been, given the suicide mission of replacing my well-tested 2012 Windows 7/10 computers with new Windows 11 units purchased in early 2025 for this purpose. The plan was to use the year prior to contest season to ensure the new computers were reliably configured. But the plan fell victim to other priorities and I only started the project 2 weeks prior to RU.

The good news is that the four PC systems have been entirely solid which is wonderful, though a bit surprising in my years of personal PC operation. Well, of course, the exception being that keyboard disconnect issue described previously. I’ve never had that happen and have no idea how I triggered it.

Thanks to everyone’s participation and QSOs. And to Andy P49Y/AE6Y and John P40L/W6LD for sharing their Aruba cottage station with me. Look forward to printing y’all again in WPX RTTY next month.

73,

Ed, P49X (W0YK)

K3S/P3 (x3) with RigSelect 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 Win11 ThinkPad X1 Carbons (x3, one for each radio), each with:
     - WriteLog 12.96F - 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: 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 

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.)