This contest snuck up on my quite quickly. I didnt really know about it until the friday before when it was mentioned at my West Park Radio Ops Meeting. A contest! excellent. I figured I would go for it. No stress just an easy contest to do. I talked to my friend Mark NB8I and he was going to operate from his shack so I decided to go over and see what he was up to. When I got there I finally got to see it live. His Yaesu FT-950 his 50 foot tower and his beam antenna. What a cool setup. I took a video of him spinning the beam around. (This was totally staged by the way)
Now that was cool to see that in real life. It was intestesting to hear him operate too. He has the Yaesu Ft-950 and a bunch of other equipment too like the "LP-PAN" adapter. Now this thing was something cool. Something so cool that it makes me want to upgrade my rig now to get one of these. Basically it looked like the coolness of SDR without your rig being a featureless dumb metal box.
I am sorry that to me doesnt look like a radio. I dont like it. I wont buy it especially how expensive it is. However get a ft-950 and lp-pan and this is what you see
Look at that. How cool. So take your nice ft-950 and make it act like a SDR all for a couple hundred dollars. (The hardware is what costs the software is free) That was cool to see that. Now I can justify the need for a FT-950 in the future. Anyhow cool shack and some interesting equipment. Mark also is able to share comports with multiple devices. I tried the software on mine so I could use N1MM and HRD at the same time. I even got a special comport sharing software. None of it worked.
That is what I did after I left Mark's I was all enthusiastic about participating in the contest so I ran home with the new comport program idea and thinking I woudl be able to use N1mm to log the contest results and then HRD to control the rig.
I spent about 4 hours of contest time trying to mess with the program and it never wound up working the radio would send crazy data to N1MM and the frequency would go to .356 or something. Anyhow abandoned that project went straight N1MM and finished off the contest.
Final results for the North American QSO party was this.
QSO: 14000 PH 2012-08-18 2105 NA8Y John OH NB8I MARK OH
QSO: 7266 PH 2012-08-19 0054 NA8Y John OH NT8Z SCOTT OH
QSO: 7250 PH 2012-08-19 0056 NA8Y John OH WW9R PAT WI
QSO: 7270 PH 2012-08-19 0100 NA8Y John OH N8BV BRUCE OH
QSO: 7263 PH 2012-08-19 0101 NA8Y John OH K4RO TOM TN
QSO: 7254 PH 2012-08-19 0103 NA8Y John OH KF4GDX ROBERT SC
QSO: 7244 PH 2012-08-19 0106 NA8Y John OH W9IMS BILL IN
QSO: 7234 PH 2012-08-19 0108 NA8Y John OH NW3H BILL PA
QSO: 7229 PH 2012-08-19 0110 NA8Y John OH WX3B JIM MD
QSO: 7226 PH 2012-08-19 0114 NA8Y John OH W0IW JOE IA
QSO: 7223 PH 2012-08-19 0116 NA8Y John OH K9CT AL IL
QSO: 7203 PH 2012-08-19 0121 NA8Y John OH NN3W JACK VA
QSO: 7200 PH 2012-08-19 0122 NA8Y John OH AB9H JOE IL
QSO: 7197 PH 2012-08-19 0124 NA8Y John OH K4YP ED NC
QSO: 14283 PH 2012-08-19 0132 NA8Y John OH NX5M BOB TX
QSO: 14265 PH 2012-08-19 0136 NA8Y John OH VE3PUX JOHN ON
QSO: 7183 PH 2012-08-19 0146 NA8Y John OH K0RH JIM KS
QSO: 7192 PH 2012-08-19 0156 NA8Y John OH NX5M BOB TX
QSO: 7201 PH 2012-08-19 0200 NA8Y John OH W4DXX ERIC GA
QSO: 3779 PH 2012-08-19 0234 NA8Y John OH WW9R PAT WI
QSO: 3773 PH 2012-08-19 0236 NA8Y John OH KS3D JIM DE
QSO: 3824 PH 2012-08-19 0237 NA8Y John OH VE3PUX JOHN OH
QSO: 14264 PH 2012-08-19 0248 NA8Y John OH W0BH BOB KS
QSO: 14250 PH 2012-08-19 0411 NA8Y John OH WO4DX GARY GA
QSO: 14253 PH 2012-08-19 0415 NA8Y John OH KL7RA RICH AK
QSO: 14220 PH 2012-08-19 0451 NA8Y John OH KK7PR RALPH OR
QSO: 3802 PH 2012-08-19 0455 NA8Y John OH WX3B JIM MD
QSO: 3794 PH 2012-08-19 0503 NA8Y John OH WB4OMM STEVE OH
QSO: 3784 PH 2012-08-19 0511 NA8Y John OH K0EA TERRY MN
QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0515 NA8Y John OH KK9V MIKE IN
QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0516 NA8Y John OH K4HTA TED VA
QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0520 NA8Y John OH KD9MS CRAIG IL
QSO: 3756 PH 2012-08-19 0521 NA8Y John OH WM9Q RON IL
QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0527 NA8Y John OH W8TM PAUL OH
QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0528 NA8Y John OH VE3KP KEN ON
QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0530 NA8Y John OH W8TOM TOM MI
QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0535 NA8Y John OH W9AV CLINT WI
QSO: 3500 PH 2012-08-19 0536 NA8Y John OH W0IW JOE IA
QSO: 7000 PH 2012-08-19 0543 NA8Y John OH K7RL MITCH WA
QSO: 7000 PH 2012-08-19 0548 NA8Y John OH N2BJ BARRY IL
40 contacts only and
CLAIMED-SCORE: 1320
Not to shabby. Not my best performance but I had some fun. The dipole is really limiting me here. The noise level on 80 and 40 is really high.. sometimes as high as 20 over. I am not sure if that is where I live (inside the city) or some flaw with the antenna. I will have to figure that out here sometime soon.
