A new low power M/S record for W/VE appears to have been achieved by a team of NCC members operating at K3LR in the recent CQWWDX RTTY Contest.  See the pictures in the photo gallery.  We asked Ray, ND8L, who was one of the instigators of this campaign, to give us some background on this operation.  Here is Ray’s report:

Well since you asked…this was the very first CQWW-RTTY contest run from the K3LR Super Station. WW3S and I have been putting a bug in Tim’s ear for years and earlier this year, he agreed to listen to a presentation on our vision of a Multi-Single Low power effort.

One of our selling points was that the RTTY Team would provide all of our own radio and computer gear and when we left on Sunday night after the contest, it would be like we were never there.  All we would use would be his antenna farm and internet access…this was the reason for low power.

While Tim’s station is not exactly engineered for this type of operation…antenna switching challenges were easily overcome.  Selecting and pointing the various arrays was done by someone in the shack, who was not operating at the time.  Sounds kinda clunk…but it worked pretty well.

Tim didn’t operate, but did provide the Team with much needed advice on selection of bands, propagation and optimal use of his antennas.  We wouldn’t have achieved the score we did without that help.

Our final score was a little over 3.5 million, crushing the former North American M/S-LP record of 3.1million.  There is an Italian team with a claimed score of 3.6 million…we’ll see how things shake out after log checking. As much as we would have liked to be #1 World, this year’s effort was a bit of a shakedown cruise and Jamie, George, Eric and I will be comparing notes to see how we can do even better in 2017.

Equipment was three Elecraft K3’s…and microHam digital interfaces.  We used N1MM logging software seamlessly integrated with MMTTY and 2Tone RTTY software.

We had two Run stations on the same band…’one CQ-ing and one sweeping the band looking for Q’s.  What made that work so well was the lockout device that NO3M designed and built especially for the K3’s. We also had a mult station.

The Team consisted of K3GP, WW3S, K3LA, K3LR, K3UA, K8IV, N8NB, ND8L and NO3M.

73, Ray