VAQP 2013 didn’t go quite the way I’d imagined it would, but it was still fun. Getting N1MM set up the night before the event, I was surprised to see fields for an exchange number. I’m pretty sure this was a new feature, and I’m not sure how popular it will be with people who prefer more casual operation in state QSO parties.
The contest ran from 10 am to 10 pm on Saturday and 8 am to 8 pm on Sunday. I spent Saturday with the Vienna Wireless Society, operating from the Annandale Swim Club. We got to the club at 9 am and it was probably unrealistic to think that we’d have antennas up, rigs configured, and N1MM networked by 10 am.
We had some technical difficulties — our spud gun line broke a few times, the reels jammed, and trees claimed a lot of line and a few spuds. At one point, while I was working on another antenna placement, I noticed the other antenna hanging team trying to get one of our fouled lines out of a tree using the tools at hand: a lifeguard chair and a pool net.
It took a couple hours to get the antennas deployed. With the contest starting at 10 am, we started operating from the parking lot. I popped the tarheel antenna on my car, tuned to 40 meters, and Kevin WB0POH began working stations. By the time we had the indoor stations set up and configured, he had worked fifty contacts, including the bonus station, K4NVA. I think all his contacts were CW, so worth twice the points to boot.
I’m not sure why, but we were not able to get the two logging computers to talk to each other. We tied them both into the club’s router, which should have worked like a hub. Both computers received DHCP addresses, and as far as I could tell, could see each other on the network. Not wanting to waste any more time, I set up the voice station to start with an exchange number of 500, while the CW station continued to build on Kevin’s earlier contacts. I’m sure hearing our SSB exchanges in the 500 range early in the day put the fear of god into our more competitive neighboring clubs. Heh.
The CW station was set up in a different room from the SSB station, and we had a counter and some stools as operating space. After sitting for a while, I got rid of the stool and used the counter as a standing desk. It felt good to dance around while working CW, and I think I might try for this sort of set up in the future as it keeps the blood flowing. Ian, N0IMB, took some video of TS-450 I was using. Unfortunately, the video does not capture my dance moves. You can’t hear the dits and dahs on the video because I’m wearing headphones.
We broke down our field stations and took down the antennas on Saturday night. The next morning, I set the home station up again. I had brought a number of station items to the field, so I had a little rewiring to do before I could get on the air Sunday morning at around 11 am. I worked intermittently until the end of the contest at 8pm that evening, but had a number of fairly large breaks to take care of family, do chores, etc. I entered as single-op, all bands, low power (100W), CW-only, non-assisted, one radio.
Propagation was so-so, and I kept hoping that after a break, it would improve. It wasn’t just my imagination: conditions were much better on Saturday. Looking at the space weather data, a CME thrown on Friday hit the ionosphere Sunday morning, just when I was starting operation. The K-index bumped up to five and stayed there the rest of the day. Conditions did seem to improve as the day went on, but this perception may also be a matter of more people joining the contest for the last few hours.
I spent almost all of my time on 40m, using the attic dipole rather than the outside 40m vertical that does better in DX contests. I had good coverage of New England earlier in the day, and worked westward into Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Arkansas. Operating NVIS, I had a reasonable chance of operating other VA stations, including VWS club member Kevin, WB0POH.
Twenty meters was not as helpful as I’d have liked — at one point, Europe opened somewhat, and I worked a succession of stations in Poland, Germany and the Slovak Republic. Later in the day, I had a brief opening to the west coast: WA, OR, and CA. Otherwise, 20m was my direct line to Florida. I did reach two stations on ten meters, but probably ground wave.
In the last hour and a half, I did good business on 80m, where I mostly ran into stations that I had worked on other bands.
I was surprised in the contest how many times I was called by stations that I had already worked. As a matter of course, I worked them again. Maybe conditions were marginal on some of those calls, and maybe they just wanted an insurance contact. I didn’t hear anyone else operating from Fairfax City (FXX) — at least not on CW — so maybe my exchange was in high demand.
My final tally was 166 contacts (some dupes), with a paltry 26 Virginia City/County, 23 State/Province, and 3 DX entities. If I calculated correctly, I may have nosed over 20,000 points. Not a great performance, but not too bad considering time and conditions.
As for the club log, I’ll have to more or less manually merge the databases from the two workstations that we used into one file for submission to the Sterling Club which runs the VAQP.