2014 CW WW DX CW Contest

Steve W6SDM

Who else worked the contest this weekend?  I didn't get to glue myself to the key because we had company over and the XYL takes a very dim view of it when I become anti-social.  But I did manage to get a good 10 hours of operating time in.

I ended up with 242 QSOs, 79 CQ zones, and just north of 150K points.  N1MM+ and SSDR played very well together.  I did notice a problem where sending CW using the function key buttons on N1MM+, it would occasionally truncate the message by a character or two.  I was also having a hard time getting the macros to program correctly - I got extra, unwanted characters in the message.  I am not sure if this is an operator problem, an N1MM+ issue, or something going on with my MK1 keyer.  I will be investigating this under non-contest conditions.

Being able to filter  down to 100 cycles is pretty useful.  50 is impractical under any circumstances that I can imagine.  Also, being able to see where the signals are during search and pounce is a real advantage.  I gave my Flex Control a workout as well as I was totally S&P for this contest.

K1ESE

Steve -

I used my 6300, 500w amp, and two wire antennas.  They all worked well:

Band QSOs Zones Countries
80:      91      15       44
40:   190       18       68
20:   259       28       79
15:   245       24       93
10:   266       24       89
Total:1051   109     373      Total Score  1,450,338

I am sending my 6300 back to Flex.....  Trading up to a 6500! 

73 de K1ESE
John

 

Sergey R5AU

Hi Steve,
no problem at all during CQWW with 6700+ N1MM Plus with Skimmer:  have no extra characters or symptoms of the ghost behavior during TX. 
My 6700 works excellent

ik2egl

Ciao Steve
I run 10 effective hours on Saturday, with software setup ssdr, n1mm+, flex6500 skimmer and winkeyer
I did not have any issue on keying, running at 31 wpm.

The pc run win7 64bit and it is well positioned in the ranking

Band QSOs Zones Countries

------------------------------   160:   67     7       30    80:   85     6       30    40:  173    10       40    20:  109    13       32    15:  203    17       56    10:   85    15       55 ------------------------------ Total:  722    68      243  Total Score = 390,305

Don

Greg - K5GJ

I played a bit in the contest also.  I was country chasing only when I had free time.  63 countries and 86 Qs.  FLEX-6500 and N3FJP Logger.  10m was crazy open in the day and 40 was pretty good first night.  Wish I had more time.

73,
Greg - K5GJ

Ken - NM9P

Impressive score.
Congrats.
You will love the 6500!
Ken - NM9P

Ken - NM9P

I had either work or family gatherings most of the weekend and only was able to hunt a few DX stations.  No real contest activity.  But it was fun to play with my recently-registered Skimmer on the 6500.  

Ken - NM9P

Asher - K0AU

Flex-6700 + Alpha + OB9-5 + N1MM+ + lots of glue for LAN remote worked great!

After CW SS I added a K1EL winkeyer and ditched the current version of CWX.  Nice to have speed control and the ESC key work in N1MM+.  Recruited an old numeric keypad + "autohotkey" remapping to function keys to run the N1MM+ CW macros for better ergonomics.

The 6700 receiver is bulletproof, and zooming + 100Hz filters helped to get through pileups for some good mults.

Feature request:  I had pans open for 20/15/10 throughout the contest.  Idea was to get a synoptic view of band activity without actually listening to the other bands.  Active window on top and other bands side-by-side below.  No waterfalls.  I'd like a single click to "rotate" the bands.  I had to close slice A on the top window, open a new slice A in the target band, click on the maximize/minimize tabs to move the new band to the top, then connect new slice A DAX to RX1.  That's a lot of clicking to change bands.

Lot of interesting real-time analytics you could run on contest band data.  Has anyone built any DAX-IQ frameworks to start plugging in PC-based signal processing and analytics?  Speech recognition/SSB skimmer?  Any Tableau experts out there to think about real-time data visualization?  You can see the future of "unassisted" contesting coming.


Band     QSOs     Pts  ZN    Cty
    14     178     501   27   65
    21     225     613   29   79
    28     203     552   31   80
 Total     606    1666   87  224
Score: 518,126

philip.theis

I also managed to squeeze in 15 hours and got over 1M points.  Great antennas make the contest so much fun.  I use Winkey so had no issues with the generated CW.   Also using MM+, a great combination.
73,
Phil K3TUF