NAQP SSB WF7T Single Op LP

Worked TCGers: N4ARO, AB4GG, AD4EB, KS4X, and N4ZZ (all bands except 160!) Thanks all for TN. Also worked AJ4JD Tim who does not appear on the TCG ros­ter. I for­warded the web­site and group links for his consideration.

I wras­tled with N1MM and my Sig­naLink USB and Vista to cre­ate a CQ wav but was bark­ing up the wrong tree. I did not rel­ish using the FT-​857D hand micro­phone, so I cob­bled together a per­fectly suit­able head-​set/​foot-​switch combo half-​hour before the start of the con­test (see below). After receiv­ing numer­ous com­plaints from my wife through­out the evening about me “yelling at old men” I have implicit per­mis­sion to do up the sta­tion control/​sound-​card sit­u­a­tion properly.

My magic G5RV at 33 and 1/​3 feet loaded up below 2:1 on 160 (for once), which allowed me to work ¹⁄₃ of all sta­tions I heard, except for TN which I did not hear and sub­se­quently did not work. The magic must have been saved for 160M because the antenna did not work well on 20M ear­lier. Come to think of it, it has never really worked there.…funny. My exper­i­men­tal 20M 3el ver­ti­cal wire beam didn’t work worth a darned either, but it was fixed to EU so they must have been suf­fer­ing the brunt of my 100w QRM (sorry guys).

Basi­cally I did not have any strat­egy here except to set par. Although my results are pretty meh, I think I did as well as I could with a low crappy wire and one non-​contest grade transceiver…and this is exactly my aim. I fol­lowed my band-​plan from the CW con­test, and made sure I went to 40M early and actu­ally had a few mini-​runs which ener­gized me quite a bit. I real­ized late that I did not have a QSO goal set. I decided I would try for 250. In the time it took me to per­form the dif­fi­cult math cal­cu­la­tion (four min­utes) I decided this lofty goal would never be acheived within the allot­ted time, so I decided on 200. Since I had already passed that mark at 202Q, I felt quite con­tent. Ah, psy­chol­ogy and the sim­ple mind.

As always, some fan­tas­tic oper­a­tors and sta­tions were heard. Very inspiring.

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North Amer­i­can QSO Party, SSB

Call: WF7T
Operator(s): WF7T
Sta­tion: WF7T

Class: Sin­gle Op LP
QTH: TN
Oper­at­ing Time (hrs): 10

Sum­mary:
Band QSOs Mults

160: 4 3
80: 67 21
40: 120 37
20: 36 22
15: 3 3
10: 2 2

Total: 232 88 Total Score = 20,416

Club: Ten­nessee Con­test Group

Com­ments:

Taped an old HC-​4 micro­phone ele­ment to a PC head­phone using blue painter tape. Used a J-​38 as a PTT foot-​switch. I don’t use that new­fan­gled SSB much!

Thanks to all for a fun contest.