NAQP SSB WF7T Single Op LP

Contesting / By

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.