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.
- 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:
- We did not take full advantage of being a multi-multi, although some of this reflects conscious choices, like not using an amplifier. Since multi-multis are permitted to use spotting assistance, we could have made more use of county spotting sites, dx clusters, etc. If we had more people, putting someone on a spotting radio and/or internet duty could be helpful.
- Indiana Counties. There was no particular pattern to counties worked or not, but numerically, we could have done better in terms of counties. One strategy would be to try to track the mobile rigs more effectively, the other would be to try to maintain consistent calling frequencies on each band for people hunting for our county.
- Longer range. We had the 40m NVIS going almost all the time, and I think that ate into our use of the G5RVs for 40m operation. We probably could have picked up additional states and possibly counties by using the more elevated antenna for 40m.
The Ring Of Deafness. I’m not sure if this is real or not, but if you look at where were did not work, it seems that there is a skip zone about 1000 km around our location. While I can imagine that the Dakotas are not well represented because nobody is there, this surely is not true of New York. Some of the New England QSO Party might have been swallowed up in this skip zone. What could we do about it? The only solution would be to change the take off angle of our antennas. Maybe it would make sense to have a vertical antenna in the mix to try to complement the coverage pattern of our high and low dipoles.
Considerations for next time:
- More bodies. With four operators, we had reasonable coverage, although there were times that we all took a break together, leaving the radios uncovered. With more people, we could operate in shifts, or double-staff each radio, with one person on the radio controls, and on the computer. Having a “spare” person to run around and fix things would also be nice.
- The least effective of our antennas was the Alpha-Delta DX-EE, which was intentionally installed low to get some NVIS effect on 40m. When we had started the event, both G5RVs were on a single switch, allowing operating position three to “rotate the beam” ninety degrees. In practice, this didn’t seem like much of an advantage for most calls, and after more than half the contest had gone by, we switched the second G5RV to operating position number one. This opened up some options for that position, and it probably would have been better to have moved it over earlier.
- A Voice keyer would be nice. Also, next year I’d suggest programming all of the keyers with the same settings: 1) “CQ INQP NN9S TEST”; 2) “CQ CQ INQP DE NN9S NN9S K”; 3) “599 MONR”.
- Better integration with the 7th Area and NE QSOP, maybe the ability to break each contact out of the log for individual submission. It would mean that we would have to copy their full county information as well. This seemed like a unnecessary level of complexity to add this year, but it wouldn’t take much more effort.