Mastodawn

Tomorrow, I plan to operate in the North Carolina QSO Party CW. I can't imagine going from 10AM to 8PM US/Eastern; I don't have that kind of Morse stamina. My initial plan was single-operator home, but I might decide the weather is too enticing to work from indoors, and go out into the field.

Maybe I should have planned ahead a bit more.

My club, RARS, is sponsoring, but the club is running from a house with cats, and my allergies aren't excited about that, so I'll work alone. Wake county isn't a rare county, so we'll see whether anyone cares about getting points from talking to me. ☺

#NCQSO #NCQP #HamRadio

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Michael K Johnson Mar 1

Halfway through and I've hit 100 QSOs, mostly running at 18WPM CW with 20W. I thought that with my weak sauce antenna that would keep me fairly local, but no, DX from France and Poland so far.

Also it's hard to write a couple words at a time while the computer sends CQ on my behalf. 😀

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Michael K Johnson Mar 1

Why I thought four hours was halfway into a ten hour event I don't know. Now I'm actually about halfway through with 132 QSOs, now including Germany. Still on 20W. This is fun!

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Michael K Johnson Mar 1

I'm now kneeling at my shack desk and wishing I had a standing desk here. I don't think my back can take much more sitting. But my knees don't take like the concrete under the rug either... This may be the determining factor in whether I can actually operate for most of the whole ten-hour stretch.

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Michael K Johnson

NC QSO Party was fun. It's the most QSOs I've done in a day. (I know, real operators do more in a single POTA activation...)

This was more intense than running POTA.

That doesn't necessarily mean more QSOs per hour — deep pile-ups slow me down. When 20m dried up, I ran on 40m, and wow that was an experience. The pile-ups sounded like FT8! 🤣 When I called "QRZ", by the time my TX relays disengaged, two or three callers would already be sending, and then a few more would jump in. I couldn't pick off prefixes because I couldn't hear prefixes, so I'd try to pick out trailing characters. With my latency decoding, some callers would just jump in again and I'd get a call in the clear, and I'm not too proud to take a tail caller because I can actually copy their call...

When 40m dried up, I went down to 80m and hunted. As I finished a pass through 80m with 20 minutes left in the event, I was called for dinner, so I rolled it up. 257 QSOs, two dupes, so 255 QSOs for points. 6 DX, the rest US and Canada. All at 20W.

The scoring is complicated enough that I didn't try to calculate points, and not1mm doesn't explicitly support the NC QSO party scoring. I just uploaded my log to confirm QSOs for other ops; I'm not in contention for awards.

The map shows that my stealth EFHW doesn't do me any propagation favors.

#HamRadio #NCQP

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Jeff Mar 2

@mcdanlj nice work! What time of day did you switch from 20m to 40m? I regret not giving 40m a try, but whenever I told myself I’d switch after the next dry CQ, another caller showed up 😀

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Michael K Johnson Mar 2

@unicycle To be precise... I started on 40m until it dried up for me, moved to 20m at 16:10Z. At 21:35Z I moved back to 40. At 23:51Z I moved to 80m.

I saw your spot and listened to see whether I could work you, but we were too far apart for ground wave, so only NVIS on 40 or 80 would have worked for a QSO.

My 80m EFHW is not optimal for 20m. If I'd had a 20m dipole or vertical up, I might have stayed there the whole time too... My 20m vertical with elevated tuned radials is a nice antenna and I briefly thought about setting it up at home for this event... 🙂