Technical problems was the main issue of this contest, Mr. Murphy was here again.
OM Power PA started to trip the breaker and to burn PA fuses. Longer heat-up solved it.
Then ACOM started to refuse autotuning. I used default settings. SDR RX used as panadapter stopped to work right before the start of the contest. Restart of everything at 00:00 UTC. Main monitor started to have few seconds blackouts every 5-10 minutes. RX verticals main preamp burned off on Saturday night, despite I played a lot with delays before the contest. Lost 80 minutes finding the reason and reconnecting of RX ANT to spare K9AY RX ANT. Two or three complete restarts of the whole PC due to frozen of something were only irrelevant issues.
Conditions were fine, but unstable. Solid low bands pileups on both mornings, then good JA openings of all high bands. Also NA openings were fine, but bands conditions went up and down unexpectedly.
Plus Aurora few times. Sunday was of a bit worse conditions. In general: good low bands, so improving of the high bands ANTs is my main goal.
Traffic was fine in general, not a lot of intruders, It wasn’t problem to find free frequency, callers came right after the first RBN spot (what a difference to SSB leg). Saturday was of running pileups, but S&P for mults was essential for final score on Sunday.
I often had problem to say to callers, that I didn’t receive their callsign. They sent exchange and went away no matter they didn’t hear their callsig played at all. I had to persuade them, that I didn’t have their proper or complete callsign. Few QSOs weren’t logged.
But contesting was good relax, as usually, including „faults stresses“, hi. Thank you for participation, guys!
FINAL score: 3 507 600
Category: SO AB HP
Rank: WW #48 EU #13 OM #1
RAW score: 3 667 376
Category: SO AB HP
Rank: WW #49 EU #14 OM #1
Call: OM7K
Operator(s): OM7RU
Station: OM7RU
Class: SO AB HP
QTH: Dolna Micina
Operating Time (hrs): 41:39
Location: Northern Europe
Band QSOs Zones Countries
-------------------------------------------------
160: 179 6 35
80: 456 17 53
40: 964 27 80
20: 582 26 79
15: 517 29 92
10: 510 33 76
-------------------------------------------------
Total: 3308 138 415 Total Score 3,649,247
Club: OM0M Dozen Dashes Contest Club
Used equipments:
- Kenwood TS-590SG
- Yaesu FT-1000MP MarkV Field
- OM Power 3500A
- ACOM 2000A
- microHAMs: MK2R+, 2x Station Master, doubleTEN, ARCO
- 2x OM Power OM6BPF
- DXLog
Antennas:
- 160m: Half Sloper
- 80m: OptiBeam OB1-80 @34m
- AD-3446 @31m
- 2-el tribander @15m
- 40m: Inv V @20m
- 20m: Inv V @10m
- 5 circle phased vertical RX array
- K9AY RX loops
73!
Riki, OM7RU/OM7K
www.tucek.sk/om7ru