Wednesday, October 4, 2023

WQ6X Survives another CQ Weird Wide DX RTTY Contest

I've been running SO many radiosport contest GiGs remotely recently that I had sorta-lost touch
with the ergonomic wonder that is the Yaesu FT-2000 transceiver setup @W7AYT's QTH in Concord (EB section).  Like its predecessor (the FT-1000mp), the transmit section can run full-power, full-duty RTTY, no problem; altho this weekend, 85-watts seemed to be the .707 point.

This was another ad-HOC CQ WW RTTY Contest from W7AYT's QTH in Concord.
In recent weeks, the WQ6X radio operation being run another, more bare-bones Windoze-7 system interfaced with a recently added RigExpert TI-5000 transceiver control unit.  Overall, the TI-5000
is an exceptional unit - EXCEPT the computer can't specifically trigger the unit in FSK and the Xmit audio (in AFSK) never makes it into the radio, necessitating a stereo patch-cable between the laptop headphone jack and the Xcvr mic socket.

With that ad-HOC arrangement in place, it was possible to limp thru the 48-hour contest weekend. 
The next frustration came from RTTY-RFI emanating from the ladder-line fed 8JK-Cobra array.








However, two often unacknowledged tools are in the background of the operation:
[KEYBOARD Macros] and RBN STATS.

Altho I was able to load the 3-el 10m yagi on 15-meters and briefly even on 20-meters,
(kinda like a gigantic BuddiPole), I was just playing around in the contest until I encountered
a 2nd-day-in-a-row occurrence of 10-meters being wide-open much of Saturday/Sunday. 
That is when I decided to make this a 10-meter only LoG submission.  Luckily, there was
a pipeline to JA Sunday afternoon.








Depending on how the CQ end-of-things classifies the submitted log,
WQ6X either took 1st-place or 2nd-place in a 10-meter QRP category. 
I'll let the contest committee sort that out later.

DiD YOU participate in the CQ W.W. RTTY Contest?

Is WQ6X in YOUR LoG?


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