WQ6X Slips solo thru NAQP Ssb

It's no secret that for me  Ssb contests take 3rd-place in priority (Cw and RTTY GiGs come first). 

For this last weekend's 12 hour NAQP Ssb GiG, this couldn't be more evident. 

While I usually take Saturdays off work commitments kept me in the office much of the day; for this GiG I did not make
it to W7AYT's QTH until 23:30z.

The original plan was to dual-OP
the NAQP contest, until remote access problems sidelined remote Ssb access from Concord. 

Instead, an ad-Hoc run as WQ6X was made from the W7AYT QTH.

The "secret" came from cobbling together the Yaesu FT-1000mp, feeding the laptop speaker audio
to the radio by way of a twisted tangle of twisted-pair cables into the MFJ-1227 microphone adapter.
A generous use of audio coupling transformers kept the ground loop hum out of the Xmit audio, allowing N1MM controlled .Wav files to call CQ and send the "Ron in California" exchange message.

While space-WX reports indicated no [major] solar storms, the atmospheric noise-levels at W7AYT were astronomical.  80/160 meters turned out to be relatively quiet; then again, almost no one could hear me there.  Even the multi-array antenna'd N6RO (barely 5 miles away) could not hear me.  When Ken "pointed" his 80-meter array in my direction (to work another station) his signal came
up 3 S-units and WQ6X still could not be heard at his relatively quiet Oakley location.

Altho there is a psychological "insurance policy" from having an array of analog & DSP filters

available to massage the noise, most of these circuits are noticeably LESS effective in Ssb contests,  compared to Cw/RTTY signals which are essentially "binary" (On/Off) and are therefore more easily amplified, "twisted" and overall enhanced.

This weekend because of the noise, certain vocal sounds were nearly impossible to decipher. 
With RTTY and Cw, I let the computer decode the signals; with Ssb I must rely on the left/right parietal lobes of my brain to figure out what is being said.

While I was bummed that I could not properly remote in with the NX6T crew, team leader N6KI (Dennis) brought in some backup operators to keep all three stations active most of the time. 
This gave me the opportunity to concentrate on my own dismal operation in Concord.

This weekend was wrapped around by the International Lighthouse and Lightship weekend and the Rookie Roundup (RTTY) on Sunday.  Similar to previous years, I was disappointed to hear ZERO lighthouse activity.  This is a shame because running at/near lighthouses during the August NAQP GiG is a lot of fun.  You may remember that WQ6X did this back in 2012 running as W6L (shown

in the above picture).



On Sunday (18:00z) I found that the RTTY Rookie Roundup was on the WA7BNM calendar. 
While I found the event in N1MM's list of contests, there is no reference to it on the 3830 Scores website.  Searching off/on for a couple of hours, I heard virtually NO RTTY activity on 15, 20 or 40 meters.  From what I could tell, no one was running RTTY this last weekend.  If the rookies want us
to play with them, it is up to them to get things started.  With only KI5AIF in the log, I finally wrapped things up at 22:35z and shut the station down.

Did YOU run the NAQP Ssb contest?

Is WQ6X (or NX6T) in YOUR LoG?