Much fun was had at the Tampa Bay Front antenna farm of AA4MD's (his neighbors *REALLY* love that tower! ha ha!). My first 100% technical error free SS competition in 5 years!

Big thank you to Jim, AA4MD, for the use of his home and wonderful RF
facilities (cant say aluminum... Maybe can say PVC and berylium copper tape?).  And also for the lovely porch right outside the shack with the view of the Canal to Tampa Bay... Lovely place to take a short breather and get some fresh air at the dock railing on a beautiful West Central Florida day!

Very simple integration of my K3 into Jim's Icom environment via microHAM
microKEYER2 and StationMaster!  Just hook up a couple of cables, and my rig can drive his entire shack RF infrastructure transparently! Drove the Alfa Spid rotor controller directly from my computer via N1MMRotor.  That set up was completely plug and play!  Plugged the Alfa Spid unit into the com port on the computer which was routed to N1MMRotor and it started playing!  Only one ergonomic issue to evercome... The SDA100'ds 180 degree pushbutton is 3 feet from where I sit on my portable temporary op table and the cables on Jim's interface are not long enough to put the controller there! Getting inspiration from Pinocchio, I went to our neighborhood ACE Hardware and picked up a 4 foot long wooden dowel rod... We call it the Finger Extension.  PRESTO!  Now to work those PR, VI and SFL mults by pressing the 180 button on the SteppIR!

Never used a SteppIR in a contest before, the thing really makes a racket in the receiver when its tuning its elements... Broadband S9+60DB hash all across the bands!  Only way to listen through this is via the AUX Diversity antenna.  The tune cycle time from 10 to 40 feels like it takes FOREVER (in all actuality, its about 45 seconds...) Its worth the wait... This antenna really plays on 20m and seems almost as good as the EF240X I used last year from the TARC facilities.

Very good conditions but activity seemed a bit down from past experience.
Worked lots of QRP stations, some were really loud too! Usual complaints about poor audio and broad signals.  Also heartened by the amount of 10, 11 and 12 checks received and also the amount of "young" sounding participants and female voices heard!  This is good indeed!

Worked usual Class A nemesis N4PN on 75m and he signed as as a Class B!  Aw, Paul, Why?  Come back to low power, will ya?

Did this one in "classic" style, single radio (well, used the second receiver
to find in band mults...) as SO2R doesnt work really well with a SteppIR!
Quite happy with my fourth consecutive SSB sweep (early on too, Thanks VE8GER), so next year will see if I can finally sweep CW.

Thanks to all the competitors who provided me with the QSO's to generate this score!  See all of you next year in SS, my favorite contest (other than Florida QSO Party, of course!)

-73-

Lu Romero - W4LT