Operation Sizzling Pork: Analysis
We went into Operation Sizzling Pork with the intention of having a good time (as we did, see Ben’s photos), rather than as an all out contest. This was something of a shake down cruise with a lot of firsts — it was the first time Ben had worked a contest larger than a sprint, the first time Tymme had operated on HF, and the first time we had tried to pull together this sort of outing. We had some modest, if arbitrary goals, which we came up with the night before the contest while feasting on pork ribs at Squealers Barbeque Restaurant. We decided that if we made 100 voice and 100 cw contacts we would be happy. As our log showed, we hit those numbers and then some:
Band Mode QSOs Pts Sec
3.5 CW 71 142 14
3.5 LSB 21 21 5
7 CW 61 122 26
7 LSB 54 54 33
14 CW 37 74 21
14 USB 38 38 12
21 CW 14 28 1
21 USB 10 10 2
Total Both 306 489 114
Score: 55,746
So, everything above our goal was gravy, but it’s still worth a little post-event analysis since next time we might want to enter on a more competitive footing.
What worked well:
- Logistics. We actually managed to get both materials and personnel to the right location, with some time to spare. Flights, rental car, UPS ground transport. Antennas went up the day before, and the stations went on the air as soon as the contest started. Not bad for a first time effort.
- Tymme’s patent-pending arborist slingshot. Antennas (green) went up more than sixty feet, and almost always on the first try. As expected, our actual station (numbered positions) and antenna deployment did not match up with our planned layout (detailed in an earlier post). We had anticipated station a station near the north east corner of the house, but those windows do not open, and the power lines (red) come in on that corner, so we shuffled around. As much as the aerial photos helped with antenna planning, actually seeing where the trees were was another story. We put the NVIS buddipole in the front yard (north, elevated 3~5m), and oriented the low Alpha-Delta DX-EE (elevated ~8m) at right angles to it, between Tymme’s house and garage. The two G5RVs were hung at ~15 and ~20 meters up, also at right angles to each other.
What we actually did
- Multiple mode operations. Every station operated in both voice and cw mode. Most of the time, we had at least two radios going, one in voice and one in cw. Sometimes, we managed all three radios. Some RF did get into the Icom 7200, but for the most part, radios did not interfere with each other.
- Logging. A secret objective of mine was to convince Ben that the N1MM logging program was not just an ugly holdover from the DOS age, but a finely honed contesting tool. Even I was surprised, however, when we got it to work on a thrown together network consisting of Macs and PCs.
- Longer range contacts. We did not do poorly in terms of medium to long range contacts, with 39 states worked in 12 hours. The close in states were worked on 40, and we got out a bit further in the late evening on 80, but the workhorse in terms of medium and long range was 20m.
- Weather. We can’t take much credit for this — we were surrounded by thunderstorms, but they went wide of our operating position. We could hear them, but we didn’t have to suspend operations.
Where we came up short:
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