Thursday, May 7, 2020

WQ6X Wanders Weirdly thru another Cinco-de-Contest

For many years I have found one excuse after another to work the Cinco-de-Contest weekend. 
Last year I wrote up a pair of "Blast from the Past" BLOGs about this unique weekend, as well
as the contest activity for that weekend:
  1. [x] WQ6X prepares for another Cinco-de-Contest Weekend
  2. [x] WQ6X prepares for Cinco-de-Contest Weekend - Pt. 2
  3. [x] WQ6X Wangles & Wrangles Stereo-Cw for yet another
          Cinco-de-Contest Weekend (2019)
Keeping all 4 contests running concurrently requires proper planning and orchestration. 
Technically all the events were mixed-mode (Cw & Ssb), altho to make things easier,
as WQ6X the choice was made to run only Cw and leave the Ssb QSOs for NX6T.
Unlike previous years, finding the
time for the ARI Dx contest amidst the
4 state QSO Parties never happened.  Overall the goal to Dual-OP another contest weekend was successful. 

Unfortunately the audio-mixing box ended up producing too much hum and was prone to RFI when the FT-1000mp was transmitting thru the MFJ tuner to the 8JK inverted vee.  Until the unit can
be properly bypassed and grounded,
it is not ready for full-fledged contest operation at the W7AYT QTH.
Altho the 4 state QSO parties use different formats for county identifiers, several years ago the N1MM developers developed a way to use a single log entry screen to log all 4 contests.

While it is possible to separate the QSOs for each contest, it turns out the combined Cabrillo file can be submitted for each contest and the LCR (Log Checking Robot) can sort it out later.
I was elected to start up the QSO parties from NX6T remotely starting at 5:20am.  Usually I am going to bed at 5am after running contest operations in the middle of the night.  Altho I had a Zoom video conference at 9am, running Zoom on the laptop allowed me to run VNC Viewer on the large monitor and S&P in between presentations during a BOR-ing District meeting.  During Saturday afternoon,
I found time to run as WQ6X from Concord.  At 03:00z I resumed NX6T operations from STN-2 until the 7QP ENDED AT 07:00Z.

During the operating stints @NX6T the overall plan was to work internet spots for each QSO Party until the bandmap was exhausted; then call CQ for each QSO Party GiG.  Unfortunately, much of
the time I received more calls from OUTSIDE each QSO party than from in the QSO Party states. 
I wrote about this frustration earlier - [CLICK HERE] to read about that.

Looking at the 3830 submissions for each contest, it would seem that NX6T was beat out by
NV9L and her husband WB9Z - well done you two.

Did You work the state QSO Parties?
Is NX6T in YOUR Log?

As of June 3rd we received the following certificate from the 7QP contest.

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