WQ6X Fudges another WEIRD October Contest Weekend.

 

 

 

 

 

Last weekend brought a number of divergent contest activities including:

•  [x] - The JARTS RTTY Contest - run as both NX6T & WQ6X.
•  [x] - The nearly non-existent NYQP event - 1 Ssb QSO for NX6T.
  
•  [x] - The Stew Perry 160 contest - run as both NX6T and briefly as WQ6X.
  
•  [x] - The Worked All Germany (WAG) Contest which I DiD NoT have time
           to figure out.
  
•  [x] - The Illinois QSO Party - run as both NX6T & WQ6X.
  

There were other operating events happening throughout the weekend that not officially being contests, were not listed on the WA7BNM Contest Calendar; including a Cw event known as
"SSS" and an event for contest clubs in New Jersey who would sign their call with a /NN indicating how many years they have been a contest club member.  An example would be W2XYZ/34 - an op with 34 years as a club member.

For WQ6X, this was one of those on-again, off-again contest weekends.  The original idea was to
run the JARTS RTTY contest from W7AYT's QTH in Concord.  Due to work commitments, operations from Concord would not happen until Saturday afternoon.  Not wanting to miss 18 hours of operating time, the plan was to run remotely from Alameda on Friday evening and the rest of the weekend could be run from Concord; except, STN-1 w/RCForb is down and STN-2 doesn't have RCForb installed - Oh what to do.

It occurred to me that being a RTTY contest, audio is NoT necessary on the remote end, as long
as I can see the RTTY decoder screen.  The decision was made to run the Alameda portion of the JARTS contest via VNC Viewer alone.  To do this required Axel (KI6RRN) to make a K3/0 connection to the radio setting the power levels for each band and "manually" adjusting the passband shift/width controls accommodating GooD copy RTTY.  Axel was my on-call control operator should that be required.  At midnight he handed over the on-call duties to N6KI.

 

As it turns out, things ran flawlessly during the Alameda leg of the weekend. 
Because I had no access to a tuning knob, I ran frequencies most of the time; except
when the lure of a juicy multiplier made its appearance.  It's a WEIRD Experience to tune
a station in by typing in decimal-point frequency changes.  Then again...... Whatever Works!

Over the years, RTTY contests have become quite a favorite.  Ssb contests can exact a toll on my voice and Cw requires me to copy code; running remote, a spotty internet connection can make this EXTREMELY Difficult, requiring NUMEROUS Repeats.

With RTTY, while the internet connection may "hiccup" frequently, decoded data is "waiting" to be shown when the internet connection resumes proper operation.  Having an effectively-complex audio-line setup allows the inclusion of Jazz/Classical music streams from my Pandora account (the best $48/yr I've ever spent).  With music in the background, I rarely get bored, even when the QSO rate drops considerably.

Indirectly, this weekend became another re-cabling weekend.  Brought back into service is a specially Mod'd MFJ-752b (to which was added an old MFJ CW-1 filter internally).  This has led me to roll out
a new Blog Entry on Rolling Your Own Audio.  We are so enamored w/built-in DSP's in our radios,
we neglect to consider that sometimes analog is STILL the way to Go. 
I even wrote a BLOG entry about this.

Monday evening, listening and ragchewing on 75-meters, we were plagued with low-level
but grating QRN.  Running split audio, the MFJ-784 cleaned up the Left-ear Experience. 
For the Right-ear, it gets a little complicated.  Earlier DSP radios (like my 1999 Yaesu FT-1000mp) have a caveat; the eDSP circuits are wired ONLY for the Main-RX audio path; the Sub-Rx is usually relatively wide-open.

While running the 5 contests 3-ways last weekend was WEIRD, all that matters is that the operations occurred.  Introducing new audio configurations for trial-run simply made this multi-faceted and more productive.  What about YOU?

DiD YOU have a protective radiosport weekend?

Is WQ6X and/or NX6T in YOUR LoGs?