[ILQSO] KJ9C/M - TWO crashed laptops?

[Mel Crichton]

My mobile QSO party philosophy has always been "Carry a backup".... so when my logging and CW sending laptop crashed big time due to low battery voltage, and I therefore needed to reformat the drive and reload Windows, I was not perturbed... I still had another old laptop on Win 98 that has served well in past QPs. I hooked it up late Saturday and verified that all worked as it should. No RF problems, no low voltage problems. Everything looked great to go. Got a good night's sleep and left Indy around ten am.

Arrived at the Crawford county position with ten minutes to spare... turned on the laptop, brought up TR..... made sure the laptop logged, tuned around for a frequency to call CQ.... just before 1700Z I hit the enter key to send a test CQ, and the laptop froze up, display went black, and no amount of cussing could bring it back. With the other laptop at home there was no choice... found a pencil and some 3x5 cards and, for the next 8 hours, over some of the worst roads ever and later in the dark, I logged by hand. The K3 has programmable memories so I set it up to call CQ while I was paying attention to driving... and paper logging.... but I had installed the rig out of reach, since the laptop was to do all the radio control. So most CW was sent with paddle.... (also not planned). (You guys who send by hand and log by hand and do all the driving have my respect... it's tough!)

Needless to say, things got busy and I never got the K3 moved within easy reach, which is why there were some long pauses when I was hit by pileups.... and there were pileups! So busy on 40 meters that I did not have time to get to 20 before I ran out of time on the schedule (had to cover 16 counties so time was tight, no delays were permitted)... later in the day, as 40 went long and noisy, 80 CW was so hot that I often could not pull out calls without setting the K3 bandpass at about 100 Hz... meaning a lot of guys who habitually call waaaay off frequency did not get worked until I tuned around for them.

Down state Illinois roads must be worse than anything in Indiana or Ohio.... you folks have my sympathy... when the roads got real bad and CW was impossible I tried to work SSB .... lots of good action, made about 60 phone QSOs, even had a run going on 40 phone in mid-afternoon.

Putting it all into Excel now...about 525 total contacts but surely there are dupes... my guess about 65 multipliers... 

Thanks to all the organizers, and especially N9JF for organizing the mobiles.

Mel KJ9C