#ncqp — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ncqp, aggregated by home.social.
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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.
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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.
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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. ☺
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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. ☺
