One Newfie short of a Sweep

I really wanted a Clean Sweep in this year's November Sweepstakes. It's the 75th running of the contest (or 75th anniversary of the first running, I guess), and the League is giving away whisk brooms to stations that work all 80 ARRL and RAC sections. And, unlike the Clean Sweep mugs (a special version of that this year, too), all you need do is submit a log showing that worked them all and the Contest Branch will send you one.

I missed by one: NL - Newfoundland and Labrador.

What's worse is that I heard a VO1 and tried to work him. He got my prefix but couldn't get the full call and he invited me to try later. Like an idiot, I didn't.

I had big RFI problems, especially on the low bands. Certainly worse than last year. Around the time we got the WARC dipole up, I replaced the 110' of RG8X on the D-56 with 60 or so feet of Belden 9913. It was pointed out to me that this did change the RF in the radio room.

The biggest issue was with the level converter. The converter, a repurposed "ADMS" cable from my Yaesu HT, lets the logging program control the radio. Radio is TTL and the rest of the serial world is RS-232 - the converter makes the transition. The latest Icom rig has a USB connection, wonder of wonders, so this oddity will soon be a thing of the past.

What would happen was that the software would lose the connection with the radio. Even while not transmitting sometimes. That it would happen while receiving leads me to believe that it's not entirely an RFI issue, but RFI is certainly the bulk of it.

Worse, I'm still getting into the POTS and DSL. Spouse reset the DSL modem 4 times before finally giving up. I also worked into the TV audio and the FM broadcast radio. No points for that - I checked.

So, I need to solve that. My station ground is not bonded to the house electrical ground and this may be an issue.

Anyway, I elected to forge ahead without getting the band/mode/freq data from the radio directly. Not a big problem, in the grand scheme of things, I guess.

The upside to this weekend is that I broke my personal contest and SS records by a lot! 511 QSOs and 79 (of 80) sections. Previous best SS score from home was 333x77 (2007 SS SSB) and previous best number of QSOs ever was 449 (2006 RTTY RU).

So there's that. :-)

Turns out that calling CQ instead of doing "S&P" (search and pounce - tune around and call other stations that are calling CQ) is way more efficient. Not only that, but the multipliers call you instead of you hunting them down. I hope no one else learns of this secret!!!

I've never believed that my home station was capable of holding a frequency and doing a run, but apparently that's not the case. On 40 and 80 it stands to reason since few stations run anything other than wires or a vertical. Sure, some folks have beams or rotatable dipoles for 40 and even 80, but they usually also run 1500 W and thus aren't in the "Low Power" classes. But I was able to make a run on 15 yesterday, too. On 15 (and 10 and 20), lots of stations have Yagis. I don't; I have a dipole.

Pretty cool that I could hold a frequency -- on 15, even! -- long enough to get a run going. I'll be trying this for upcoming contests you can be sure.