This has been a strange winter in the Midwest. Unseasonable below zero temps in December and a week long January thaw with fog and some temperature inversion tropo just before the contest. Of course that fell apart and contest day dawned with conditions totally depressed. At least it wasn't noisy like it gets when its in the single digits. I finally got the station working on the bottom 4 bands with the new Flex 6700 and the old transverters. Not exactly how I want it yet since the 2, 222 and 432 transverters are still manually band switched with my old IF interface box and all still convert to the 10M band, but at least I can see a bandscope for 6M and 2M (or 222 or 432) at the same time now.

Propagation was marginal all day Saturday and it was a tough slog. Despite the mild weather many fewer rovers went out or carried effective microwave setups. NAQP SSB kept down the numbers of SMC locals that get on VHF casually or to give out points. No Es at all either day. Saturday night I turned to WSJT and was pleasantly surprised by the number of stations trying MSK-144 and making real time skeds on the PJ page. While I made a few pre-contest skeds with some of my regulars, I was able to generate a lot of mults bycalling CQ on 50.280 and/or setting up skeds online. Even had a few instances where I had a mini pileup and was able to work two stations at the same time by manually switching messages half way htrough the sequences. It was a great deal of fun and it hope the trend continues! I stayed up too late and got up too early but the number of exrtra mults was worth it.

Sunday propagation was marginally better but still not really good. I made few really long QSOs and even those were not very strong and often did not extend to 432 or beyond. Lots of CW above 2M. I did some WSJT in the morning and could see that folks were still trying to do it all day long but when the ionoscatter and the rox both start to die out around noon its basically time to hang it up. There did seem to be a little lift along the Mississippi river in the evening and I worked N0JK QRP/p in EM28 and a few other stations down that way, but it wasn't as good as it has been in the past. There were some good hookups on ON4KST 144/432 R2 with distant stations too that helped the mults and the score. All in all not a bad January contest.

Had a lot to learn about the new SDR and apparently still do. But sometimes it does things it shouldn't that I don't think I'm causing by inexperience. Like suddenly not keying the sequencer (and transverter, amp etc) when I change slices because it randomly switched my spilt IF tranverter setup to a different configuration for no apparent reason. Other times things don't work the way I set them when it suddenly “forgets” my previous cw filter setting, preamp or TX drive settings. The Maestro buttons that are supposed to move the A and B RX slices around the panadapters seem to do unpredictable things with transverter setups like switch to different antenna and transverter I/O configurations, change drive levels and even revert back to the 10M band instead of the 2M transverter overlay. And often when I spin the Maestro tuning knob fast it tunes the wrong way! I may not be doing everything right, but as far as I can tell its not supposed to do any of those things and I've yet to figure out why it does.

Its also not as easy as a conventional rig to switch to CW quickly when another station can't hear my lower power. And its multi step menu driven access to memory channels makes them practically useless for quick QSY. On the plus side the NB technology and adjustable AGC threshold are killer. The selectivity and strong adjacent signal rejection is a joy and it even handles splatter well. Its pretty easy to set up and run WSJT-X. I'm hoping the annoying stuff I've encountered can eventually be resolved either with my continuing education or some software fixes.

73 de Bob K2DRH