[Elecraft] Power Management Contest

[Larry Cahoon]

Since I sponsor this I joined in the fun.

Equipment was ten 1600 mAh AA batteries - they came off the charger a half 
an hour prior to the contest. I used the K2 for 10 and 15 meters.  I kept 
the use there to a minimum as the K2 does draw a bitg more power.  Mainly I 
looked for easy multipliers there early in the contest.  Then I switched 
over to the K1 for the workhorse on 20 and 40 meters. Finally I brought out 
the Sierra for use on 80 meters.

Operating strategy was partly to hit new multipliers to get the points 
up.  I also scanned the bands, hit who I could get and then took a short 
break to let new blood show up on the band.  I didn't run a frequency 
figuring that with the CQing I'd run the power down quicker that way and 
end up with fewer total QSOs.

I kept the power at 2 watts out, again to conserve the batteries.  The 
logic was with higher power I'd use up the batteries quicker and with lower 
power I'd have more trouble being heard.  It is not clear what is the best 
choice here.

In the end the batteries still had power left in them.  The K1 showed 11.9 
volts on Rx and 11.2 on Tx.  I should have been able to take them down to 
around 10 volts on Tx.  I did quit about two hours early as I felt a cold 
coming on and wanted to get the rest.  The contest ends at 1 am here on the 
east coast. In the end NA said I ran almost 8 hours.  So I still had two 
more hours I could have run in the contest.  I think the batteries would 
have easily have held up for that long.

Final take was 213 QSOs and 102 multipliers for a score of 22,032 points.

The summer numbers were

      band      QSOs      points    mults
      -----------------------------------
      160          0           0       0
       80         49          49      23
       40         80          80      29
       20         66          66      32
       15         13          13      10
       10          8           8       8
      -----------------------------------
      TOTAL      216         216     102      SCORE: 22,032

73 de Larry.............WD3P in MD
http://www.qsl.net/wd3p/