12/30/2002 | NX5M 10 meters was alive and well in December 2002!

A group of fine ops contributed to make this years raw score of 2.932 million the best 10m contest score ever from this station.

Friday night was about average as far as qso totals are concerned. But as I was monitoring our signal I noticed that there was a lot of extra hum in between our audio. It was also evident in the headphones as the ops reported that they could hear it in between transmissions. We decided to keep operating and see if the problem could be resolved after we went qrt for the night. About 1230am CST I told the guys to just go to bed and I would stay up all night and see if I could fix the problem.

Where to start? A different computer was used this year so I figured that had to be the problem. To make a long story short, I tore the whole station apart. Moved radios 3 different times and had computers taken apart and put back together....all in all it was quite a mess. I still do not know what was causing the problem but about 4am I had things sounding clean again. At 3am I was about ready to get out of the hobby.

Saturday morning rolls around and I am sleeping....not for long...."Bob, the computer crashed!" I will omit what I said. Restart and all was well so I went into town to get breakfast for everyone.

Saturday went well from then on. At the half-way point of the contest we were behind the 2001 pace and I was beginning to believe that 2.1 million points was going to be about it. But by the time we shut down Saturday night we were ahead of the 2001 pace by a substantial margin.

Sunday morning as N5XJ and I were talking in the kitchen we agreed that with the extra qsos made Saturday night, thanks to a nice two hour e-opening from north to east, we might just have a shot at 3 million points if we could maintain some good runs throughout the day.
Taking the time to find and work some mults early Sunday morning made a difference too. We ended with 315 mults which was well above the anticipated 290-300.

Rates stayed pretty steady throughout the day on Sunday but as expected they were down compared to Saturday. The guys worked hard on Sunday. I think having exceeded average totals by the time we shut down Saturday night gave us added incentive for Sunday and made all of us work that much harder to try to reach an even higher goal. It paid off.....about 800,000 points better than expected.

Don, N5OLS (you may remember Don as KH8/N5OLS) came and operated for the first time. How Don could play on the internet all night and then stay handy all day Sunday is beyond me. He did take a 2-hour nap though but he told me that he went into the shack about 4am, put the radio on 28025 and went to sleep on the floor. He figured he would be awakened when the band opened. He was right!

Jack, N5DUW had a 2-hour drive and was a first-time member of the operating team. Jack operated 90% of his time on cw and was a big help.

Lance, KB5ZFO was able to be here almost all of Saturday. He put in some valuable time while he was here and ran some nice rate. We were all looking for him on Sunday but I later found out that he got sick after eating too much shrimp Saturday night at a Christmas party.

Mike, N5XJ is always a permanent fixture at multi-op gatherings here.
Not only does Mike bring in fine operating skills, but he is also a person who is my right-hand when it comes to working on antenna and tower projects as well as some pre-contest prep work.

And me, Bob, NX5M enjoyed having the guys over. Other than that first night, when I stayed up practically all night to try to fix a problem, I had a great time. Sunday I was pretty worn out and I was frustrated while operating ssb and asking for "Charlie Charlie Alpha ur 59 Texas". I asked for CCA 4 times and everyone else kept calling. Frustration got the best of me so I threw the headphones off and took a walk.

And finally we had a year in which thunderstorms did not disrupt our operation. Last year lightning hit us Sunday morning.

I had done some antenna enhancements the month before the contest and I think that helped. This year we used a 5/5/6/5/5 stack, a fixed tribander on a new tower plus a single rotatable tribander to add coverage and a 4/4 spray array on another tower. A total of 4 towers had active antennas on 10 this year. Two other antennas that could have been used on 10 were not even connected but it is nice to know that they are there in case of a problem with the main array.

Will this be the 6th consecutive year of finishing in the top 5?
I guess we will know for sure in a few months. -- NX5M