WQ6X SQUEAKs Thru another NAQP RTTY Contest

Rather than play the remote QRP game, this year's July NAQP RTTY GiG was run Low Power
to test the new antenna system at W7AYT's QTH.  It also provided the opportunity to re-evaluate
the Stereo-RTTY method, recently written up in a recent Blog ([CLICK HERE] to read that).

While both goals were accomplished, despite super-fine Space-WX conditions, signal-levels
were extremely POOR throughout the 12 hours of the NAQP RTTY GiG.

For Single-OP operations, we are limited to operating only 10 out of the 12 contest hours,
raising the question of which two hours to NoT be transmitting (off times must be 30+ minutes). 
From this, four different approaches come to mind:

• Start at 20:00z (1pm PDT) and run the contest all the way thru, ending @06:00z.
• Start EXACTLY at 18:00z (11am PDT), eventually ending operations at 04:00z (9pm PDT).
• Begin @19:00z (NooN PDT) and end at 05:00z (10pm PDT).
• Some combination of the above, converting a slow-rate operating period into a 30-minute off-period, should we go more than 15-minutes w/o a QSO added to the log.

The above choices assume that band propagation is cooperating, which is wasn't for this NAQP event.  Surprisingly 20-meters was a complete no-Show in the WQ6X LoG.

It turns out, the 3-el 10-meter Long John yagi tunes very nicely on 15 & 20 meters as a rotatable dipole, thanks to the MFJ-993B Intellituner.  Hoping that the 20-meter situation was simply one of
a low M-U-F (Maximum Usable Frequency), an early appearance was made on 40-meters,
which didn't actually until nearly 03:00z.

At 05:00z 80-meters finally provided a handful of QSOs / MULTs.  At 05:30z (10:30pm PT), I joined Barbara (NK6Y) on the Redwood Radio Roundtable (3.849 MHz) for a brief ragchew made difficult by poor low-band propagation between Ben Lomond (NK6Y) and Concord (WQ6X).  We both ended up listening on the KFS web SDR (which is situated between both QTH locations) to improve readability.

With 20-minutes left, a couple of QSOs were added on 80-meters and then on 40-meters.  While the goal of 100 QSOs never quite materialized (96 was the final total), more important was running RTTY into the recently revamped antenna system in Concord.

DiD YOU work the NAQP RTTY Contest?

Is WQ6X in YOUR LoG?