UTARC 2001 Texas QSO Party
N5XU participated in the Texas QSO Party, 29-30 September 2001. We operated in the multi-operator, multi-transmitter class, with W5JLP, KB5LBN, AA5BT, K5PI, KM5TY, and WM5R operating. We were active on 7MHz, 14 MHz, 21 MHz, 28 MHz, 144 MHz, 222 MHz, and 432 MHz.
The University of Texas Amateur Radio Club is celebrating 80 years of ham radio at the University of Texas at Austin. Experimental/Amateur station 5XU made its first transmissions on October 1, 1921. Since then, the club has held the callsigns W5NLH, W5EHM, W200EHM, and N5XU. To celebrate this ham radio milestone, the club decided to operate a special event station K5T ("Kilo Five Texas") during the Texas QSO Party and the week afterward, from our on-campus club station, N5XU. This was the first time in recent memory that a multi-transmitter contest effort was launched from the UTARC club station. On HF, the club is truly a tribander and wires antenna arrangement. We had been debating entering multi-single or multi-multi, but decided that it would be more fun to do multi-multi. The plan we stuck with for most of the contest was to keep the high-power station with the rotatable tribander on 10/15/20 and the low power station with the fixed dipole on 40. This way, we were able to work the North American and some DX multipliers on the high bands, and work the Texas county multipliers (especially the mobiles) on 40. On Sunday afternoon, when the pickings got really slim on 40, we started using the low power station on 15, using the 40 meter dipole. This was not an ideal antenna by any means, but we got out and made probably 30 or more QSOs than we otherwise would have made.
Our equipment performed fairly well during the contest. Our intial TR Log networking set up had a problem, though - data was travelling in one direction and one direction only. We had purchased an ISA multi-I/O expansion card for the station A computer the day before the contest, and while it had looked like everything had installed properly and was identified, it turns out that COM4 was behaving in a unidirectional manner. Station B was seeing station A's information, but not the other way around. Moving that to COM1 (which had been RigBlaster keying - which we didn't use during the contest anyway) solved the immediate problem. The bandpass filter on loan from K5TR worked quite well, and aside from being crowded in the shack (9' x 12' floorspace) we did manage to keep both stations A and B on the air the entire contest period. We had contemplated running both stations high power (we even had a loaner amp from K5PI in the shack,) but as we could only borrow a single set of bandpass filters, and the antennas are really close to each other, we decided against it. We also made a few VHF/UHF QSOs on Saturday night, but nothing on six meters, as our only six meter radio is the Yaesu FT-847 we were using on 40 and (later) on 15. We did call CQ on six a few times in the afternoon without takers, but we didn't linger. We had the two meter radio on 144.200 pretty much the entire contest, listening for stations when we were not actively CQing there. We also didn't make any QSOs on 80 or 160, primarily because the hours of the contest operation included only one hour of darkness, none of the mobiles were likely to have 80 or 160, and there were much better ways to spend our time. Informally, our goal was 1,000 QSOs with a reasonable number of CW contacts. As it turns out, almost 3/4 of our QSOs were on phone, where we could achieve much higher rates, especially on 10M. At least five of our operators made CW contacts, and at least four made phone contacts. It looks like our score alone is greater than the total combined scores of both the North Texas Contest Club and the Texas DX Society teams in the 2000 TQP. We had a great time in the contest.
Bonus points: 1,000 (worked Texas mobiles WA5MLT and K5OJ each in five different counties for 500 x 2 = 1,000 bonus points.)
Contest Logging was done with TR LOG contest logging software. The following reports and log were created using TR LOG's post-contest processor.
Send comments to: utarc@www.utexas.edu Last updated: 17 October 2006 |
