Harvard Wireless Club Bulletin May 3, 1999

Well, we did our best in the Mass QSO Party this past weekend and although we didn't make our 1,000 QSO goal we still have a good chance at bringing home the Multi-Op plaque. We'll find out in short order how the other MA club stations did.

All equipment performed flawlessly for this contest as did our new logging program TRLog. The consensus seems to be that we prefer CT for contests but that TRLog more than serves the purpose for those contests not covered by CT. There were no computer glitches this contest and on Saturday, there was no interference between the CW and SSB stations. Everyone liked how the X-7 performed and reports were routinely 59 even when the other stations were just above the noise level. It's great to have the 2nd position back in operation -- and in much better shape than it has ever been before. Bill noted some possible RF feedback in the mic on the 2nd position which, as it turns out, was due to the level control on the SM-8 being set wide open. This was the first time we had used the SM-8 on the IC-736 and we failed to tweak the audio level properly before we got rolling in the contest.

N2MSE put in three strong hours on SSB Saturday and did a bang-up job. At times, Nick had some real good pileups going. 20M was the money band for both CW & SSB this year, although we had some good short openings on both 15 and 40 during Day 1. By midnight on Saturday, we had made 357 contacts on 15-80 Meters. Day 2 was a propagation disaster! Bill spent most of the day attempting to work *anything* but with very little luck. Only 76 contacts went into the log on Sunday. K9HI stopped by in the late morning, but suffering the ravages of a nasty cold, went QRT and directly home. By 20:30Z, Bill threw in the towel and conceded defeat to the lousy conditions.

KO1O at the controls, MA QSO Party, Day Two.

Working VHF was a real thrill! W1XM went into the log on all three bands as did K1UR (Nels) to the west of us. We also had five 6 Meter contacts and that was a first for W1AF on that band. Where we really missed out was working more MA stations on HF and VHF. There just weren't many on the air. AA1IZ did a nice job operating portable out in Hampden County, and K1UR and K1HT seemed to be the most active single ops in Middlesex County. We never did work the Fall River group out on MV Island -- too bad! Only 4 of the 14 MA counties went into the log. SSB contacts were 3:1 over CW but point-wise and mult-wise, the totals were much closer. In fact, we had twice as many CW contacts this year as we did in our best MAQP effort back in 1990.