There will be more more posts on Operation Sizzling Pork, but I intend to draw it out. Later in the week: the travelogue, a how-to guide for using Macs during mutlirig contests, and some strategic analysis. Right now, however, my priority is to share the results of the contest with other teams members. I am still doing some sanity checking on the logs and making sure that no contacts were missed due to database synchronization issues, but I expect that the logs I have in hand are 99% final.
This was a 12 hour contest, from 16:00 UTC on Saturday, May 5 to 04:00 UTC on Sunday, May 6. We operated three radios, as planned using four antennas to obtain dx and local coverage. We operated under Ben’s call sign, NN9S from the Chaos Lodge in Bloomington, so our exchange was “MONR” for Monroe County, Indiana. All stations ran N1MM in a networked configuration, with the database replicated across all machines.
We logged 314 contacts, but 8 were duplicates, so 306 usable contacts. In some cases, we were able to log two entries when contacting mobile stations parked on county line boundaries.
Of the 314 contacts, 128 were phone and 186 were cw (morse code). Station 1, an icom 7200 at 100W to an Alpha-Delta DX-EE at 25 feet logged 83 contacts. Station 2, a Kenwood B2000 at 100W to two orthogonal G5RVs at 40 and 60 feet, respectively, logged 148 contacts, and station 3, a Kenwood TS-450 at 100W to a buddipole configured for 40m NVIS operation logged 83 contacts.
As predicted, 40m was the workhorse band and remained active throughout the entire event, yielding 119 contacts. 15m was strong earlier in the day, and produced 24 contacts across the country, drawing strongly on participants in the 7th Area QP event. We also had a phone and cw contact to Venezuelan stations on 15m. In the late afternoon, 20m was helpful for both national and international contacts. Tymme had a run of six Italian stations on phone from the ARI contest. The 15m band dropped off around 6 pm local time, but 20m continued into the late evening. Around this time, the New England QSO party was also in full swing, providing contacts on 20m and 40m. Around 9 pm local (01:00 UTC), we started working 80m and continued until the end of the contest, working a total of 93 contacts.
At several points during the contest, we were spotted on various clusters resulting in bursts of pileup activity. Here’s a search from DX-cluster performed earlier today:
During the contest, we did well in terms of long-range multipliers, having worked 39 states and 5 provinces. Our U.S. states included AL, AZ, AR, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MT, NC, NH, NJ, NM, NV, OH, OR, PA, RI, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, and WY. The provinces included NS, QC, ON, MB and BC. We worked WB8WKQ in MI, WA3HAE in PA, and W7RN in NV four times each on various bands and both modes.
Our coverage of Indiana was more spotty, particularly in the southeast corner. Overall, we reached 35 out of 92 counties. It looks like the NVIS signal and the low multiband antenna performed well. Within Indiana, KV9X yielded four log entries, but was really two contacts spanning county lines. We worked a number of other stations three times including N9FN, N9LF, and W9LJ. Our single home county contact (MONR) was with the Indiana University station, K9IU.
Our final score will end up being something in the neighborhood of 55,000 points, which is pretty decent considering that this was a first time effort and that we are not experienced contesters.