2011

TBD

Everything pretty well came together station-wise for the contest and the propagation deities really favored us this time around. 10 thru 40 were great all weekend. 80 was terrific Friday night, but not so much Saturday night. Jim W4PRO did a terrific job milking top band for multipliers and what Qs were available. The flux was down some, but that probably helped the low bands while ten meters was open world-wide.

George, K4GM, and I decided to do this just for the fun of it.  I'm rather new to RTTY contesting, so wanted to experiment and learn.  George, just wanted to have fun. Decided months ago to make the move over to N1MM, and have been able to make things work on CW.  The week prior to the contest, I got all the K3 stations up and running with N1MM, but NEVER could get the Orion II and Omni 6 working on 10/15.  (Software can make you feel soooooo small....)  Forced to used brand 'W', which I have been using with no real issues for years.  ALL the rigs immediately work with 'W', so went with that.

Got into this contest on a whim at the last minute, and started late. Had more problems in the short time I op'd this contest, than all other contests in recent history. Rig would lock up when you pressed the 'esc' key to kill a CQ.  Apologies to those ops where I just disappeared, for many seconds.

For some reason, just wasn't too 'up' for this contest and didn't have the enthusiasm I should have.  I quit an hour early, while running 40 and went and when to a Sushi restaurant.

Can't really add to what has already been written about the FANTASTIC conditions. Everything was open all the time, it seemed. Some of the EU signals on 10 and 15 were super loud! Being a RTTY contester with limited experience, W4PK and N2QT, showed me how they were using two digital windows, each with a different antenna source. Thought this was really a neat thing.

Was using this as a tune-up for the new 10M RTTY contest. Thanks for the contacts.

With flares occuring later in the week we didn't know quite what to expect for the contest. In general the bands seemed to be quite good. 10 certainly could have been better, but we're thankful for the Qs we did make on that band, with many of them being skewed path Eur. Again very few station problems with the biggest one being a computer problem on 15.

Don't want to jinx things, but we essentially had no technical problems during the weekend. Even the computers behaved remarkably well! To date we've been limited to a single rig on each band. We had hopes to have a second rig on 40 and 20 for this contest, but continue to have problems with isolation between rigs. Decided to delay rather than wipe out the front end of another radio!  Thanks to all for the Qs and patience on the low bands in the midst of mother natures crashes!

Second time for me and the new software.  I was messing up left and right.  I was the problem, not the software. First time in this contest, so stumbled a lot as far as what to do and when. What appears to be excessive LF's sent caused me to 'chase' the other guys callsign up the screen, with my mouse, more than once.  In retrospect, it was kind of funny.