Last Saturday, the 2007 version of the Michigan QSO Party took place. My club, ARROW, once again made this a club event, with Tom Snoblen hosting this year. We had a pretty good turnout with about ten guys showing up at one point or another.
We had three stations going from just after noon to about 8 pm. Tim, KT8K, brought his Orion and an antenna for 20m, so he concentrated mainly on that band. The club’s IC-746PRO was connect to a B&W broadband, terminated folded dipole, and we operated that radio mostly on 40m.
Sam KC8QCZ brought his IC-746PRO and hooked it up to Tom’s 80m dipole. We operated this station mostly on 80m, and even during the afternoon, we were able to make plenty of contacts. I attribute this to Tom’s fine antenna–I certainly don’t have this much success at my QTH with my random wire antenna.
We had planned to use the N1MM logging software, but after abortive attempts by both Sam and Tim, we decided to go with the N3FJP MI QP program. Both Tim and I already had this on our computers, and it worked quite nicely. They wanted to try the N1MM software as we’re thinking about using it for Field Day, but seeing as how difficult it was to configure and get running, I hope they think twice about this. It may be good for experienced operators, but on Field Day you have many inexperienced ops, and it could be a real disaster.
Overall, we made about 270 contacts. I’m guessing that I made about 90 of them. That’s certainly not going to be winning us many prizes, but it’s better than we’ve done in the past. It’s progress, at any rate.
Jeff - K3OQ says
Dan,
I also had issues with N1MM. My issues were more with consistancy problems than anything. I also didn’t see the need to change/upgrade as frequently as people did on the N1MM relfector. I have moved over to WinTest as my major contest software and am sticking with N3FJP for the ARCI, State QSO Partys and such. What call did you use? I participated in the MI QSO Party and blogged it at http://k3oq.net/index.php?/archives/16-Michigan-QSO-Party.html. I enjoyed the hour or so that I played around.
Have a great day.
72,
Jeff (K3OQ)