[MiQP-Mail] NU8Z/m (w/ND5S) 2005 MIQP Summary

[NU8Z]

ND5S and myself teamed up to operate NU8Z/m for this year's MiQP.  The good news is that we had 793 QSO's, the bad news is that we had only 60 multipliers! The results are as follows:


Call NU8Z/m (W/ND5S)

BAND   CW     PH     MULTS
==========================
80      159       0     12  
40      383       8     30  
20      233      10     18 
---------------------------
Tot    775        18    60 

793 total qso's x 1568 points = 95,080 points.

 We are pleased with the QSO total, but what can I say about the mults?  We like others, had planed on 40 meters as the band to get many of our mults. Well, as you know this did not happen. We worked only a few Michigan stations on 40. We held out hope that 40 meters would get better, but it really never did. When we do the ole  "if I, woulda, shoulda" post operation review, it is plain to see that we should have been moving our 20 (or 40) meter cw contacts to phone when we needed them for a mult.  We would move when asked, but did not ask others to move. We tried the phone CQ thing on both 20 and 40, but could never get anything going.

The Route:  The route went as planned. We hit all 26 counties in the following order:
INGH,EATO,CLIN,IONI,KENT,OTTA,MUSK,OCEA,NEWA,LAKE,MASO,MANI,BENZ,GRTR,WEXF,MISS,ROSC,CLAR,OSCE,MECO,MCLM,ISAB,MIDL,
GRAT,SAGI,SHIA,CLIN(again),INGH(again)
We were turning off I-96 at the Okemos exit (Ron's home) when the contest ended. We spent a lot of time on some secondary roads to pick up ISAB,MIDL,GRAT,SAGI,SHIA. We never got lost! 

The Equipment: For the most part everything went pretty well. We did have some RFI problems that would cause the car to stutter on 40 meters. This seemed to come and go. It was not as bad when we ran thru the tuners. This did not happen when tested with my rig, but did with Ron's? We will look into that.

The rig was Ron's IC-706, and it worked well. The antenna was a Hustler with 20, 40 and 80 resonators. It seemed to work well on 20 and 80 and 40 CW. We ran it through a tuner on 40 SSB. I don't think it worked to well, but I'm not sure. We need to do some testing. On 80 CW it was clear that the Hustler did a great job.  We were able to run like gang busters. 

We used a separate car battery to power the Laptop, it lasted the whole 12 hours. (you were right Jim-thanks) We still had a little noise from the computers on 40, but it was not bad, and pretty insignificant compared to the other 40 noise!

General Comments:  Worked a lot of DX, even worked DL's, RA and OK on 40 meters. Worked only 2 in state mobiles. Worked K5OT the most.(32 times), Others worked many times were KU8E, K0RI, N6MU, K4CC, K5WAF, K7QQ just mention a few.  Got lot's of strange looks with the antennas on the car. 

In Summary: We both had a great time and feel we did a good job activating some counties and passing out some QSO's in the 2005 MiQP. But that being said, there is plenty of room for improvement. This is especially true in the case of multipliers. There was "remember the Maine" (missed that mult..hi), and there was "remember the Alamo". Well, we have decided that we will be back in 2006 with the battle theme of "remember the multipliers"  

73 Mark NU8Z
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