[Flexradio] Scoring Details V31MD SDR CQWW SSB

[Gary Schmidt W5ZL]

By now you may have tired of hearing about the V31 thing, and I couldn’t blame you. But we just posted our scores and summaries to the 3830 contest site which is THE website where everybody that’s anybody posts their claimed scores, pounds their chests, makes excuses for their poor performance, or all of the above. Well, we SDR contesters aren’t any different. We’ve got our excuses, too, as you’ll read below (if you haven’t already hit DELETE).   Here’s the text of what we just posted to the contesting world. Note that we are currently sitting somewhere around 13th in the world (non-US), but of course, that’s subject to some slippage as more stations report.   Gary W5ZL                       CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB    Call: V31MD  Operator(s): AA4SW (V31SR), WO0Z (V31LL), AB5K (V31TG), W5ZL (V31ZL), V31MD  Station: V31MD    Class: M/2  QTH: Placencia, Belize  Operating Time (hrs): 48    Summary:  Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries  ------------------------------   160:  188     7       14    80:  343    13       36    40:  819    26       69    20: 1115    24       75    15: 1134    25       77    10:   55     6       18  ------------------------------  Total: 3654   101      289  Total Score = 3,085,290    Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club    Comments:   Team SDR, comprised of Eric AA4SW (V31SR), Larry WO0Z (V31LL), Terry AB5K (V31TG) and Gary W5ZL (V31ZL) rented Bob V31MD's Belizean shack for CQWW SSB and descended on Placencia with a complement of three SDR-1000s - a pair and a spare - and the requisite computer gear to mount the first ever DXpedition/contest operation using exclusively software defined radios.   Technical complexity for our setup was relatively high, but for the most part we were able to dispatch technical problems quickly as they arose - with one key exception. We realized in the moments leading up to the starting gun that we didn't have what we needed to interface either SDR to Bob's Ameritron 600 amplifier. Had we been near, say, a Radio Shack, no problemo. Working as we were with fairly modest antennas, running 100 watts instead of 600 was a serious handicap on the low bands, and kept us from maintaining nighttime runs as we had hoped to do.   Propagation from Belize was a little surprising. 20 meters seemed to largely die with the sunset (around 6 pm local), and 15 didn't tend to wake up until nearly noon. 10 was virtually non-existent until Sunday when we had a pretty good pipeline to South America (lots of LUs) and a handful of other Caribbean stations, but NIL to the US or EU (or anywhere else, for that matter). 40 was decent, but again we had a lot of trouble holding a run frequency in the DX band with 100 watts and a vertical, and our runs were modest aside from a spectacular early Sunday morning opening to JA. 160 was excellent both nights to the States and by the second night it was hard to find anyone we hadn't worked. 80 was just plain tough sledding.   The receiver in the SDR lived up to its press clippings in the very crowded bands of this contest. The panadapter display, felt by some before the contest to be "cool, but largely useless in a contest we should be running in" became downright invaluable in spotting pin holes that we could drop into to try to establish a run frequency, and to spot possible 40 meter split frequencies. N1MM integrated with the SDR's application software flawlessly and proved a huge hit with the team. Our biggest problem was being heard.   Rigs: Two FlexRadio Systems 100-watt SDR-1000s, networked wirelessly using N1MM logging software and N8VB virtual com port software. Station one was a 3 GHz Pentium 4 desktop machine (WinXP) and a Delta 44 sound card plus a Heil Pro Set Quiet phone. Station two was a 1.8 GHz P4 Dell Inspiron 700M notebook computer (also WinXP) with an outboard Extigy USB sound card and a Pro Set Plus headset.   Antennas: Two element multi-band quad at 35', HF2V for 80/40 located in a saltwater lagoon about 70' from the shack, an HF9V vertical for 80-6 just outside the shack, and a top-loaded 160 meter vertical erected nearby just prior to the contest.   We had a GREAT time!