2011 International Pi Day / Einstein's Birthday (1879 - 1955)

Stuff about Pi
Symbol pi adopted by Euler in 1737 Compact summary about history of pi Pi to 2000 places: Pi ice cube trays	Really good Nova site about AE

Monday, 14 March, 2011

Band / Ops Plan

QSL Routing

NOTE: All QSL requests have been resolved as of 24 March 2011.

IF YOU WANT AN ELECTRONIC QSL CARD IMAGE sent to you by return e-mail
   send your qso info (date, time, band, mode, report, any other comments) to lakeeffectarc@charter.net
   We will send you a completed QSL card image by return email

IF YOU WANT A PAPER/PRINTED QSL CARD
   Send $1 plus SASE plus contact info (on a plain piece of paper or your card) to
   Lake Effect ARC / Pi
   36 Southfork St
   Marquette, MI 49855

QSL card for this event:

International Pi Day – After Action Report. Lake Effect put a lot of marbles in play for Pi / Einstein Day and came up roses for sure, with a good time (and great Pi(e)) being had by all. First up: new ops. We are pushing on Ham Radio Deluxe as a standard operating interface, and it worked out pretty well.  Note that the HRD/radio screen is on the 2^nd monitor to the right, and the DM-780 digital program is on top of the open logbook on the laptop:

The Kenwood TS-570 is to the left of the laptop screen. This arrangement is very smooth and convenient for digital. Using the logbook directly, as for SSB qso’s, is still a little clumsy, but clearly manageable.

We are not sure we found all the hooks and handles to having a special event “identity” for HRD. We bludgeoned it into submission and made it work, but we could not get the event logbook to have the “focus” when started. There is probably an automated fix for that and we’ve posted a couple of questions to the support forum on that subject.

 The base set of PSK macros needed only minor tweaking for the event, and it looks like there is a way to have a set of custom macros for events saved and activated with the event identity. Again, more reading will probably help, but the level of effort to make it work was pretty low. Still, a thing more to explore.

On the ops front, we still prefer the waterfall and active channels arrangement in Digipan 2.0. The DM-780 panel has just way too many choices and options crammed together. It will take some getting used to, but that is certainly our intent.

 We were very happy with our operating results. There were several questions on the table.

1. Would anyone be out there interested in a special event running on Monday (zulu time). Emphatically yes! Contacts were no more difficult than any other day or night.
2. Would anyone be interested in a theme as esoteric as Pi Day and Einstein’s Birthday. Again, emphatically, yes.
3. Would anyone follow the QRZ.com links to the event web page and actually follow instructions there to get QSL’s? Very much yes. We had  reports in our club inbox seconds after qso’s were over. Very, very cool.
4. Would people go for electronic QSL images over paper? OVERWHELMINGLY yes. We got two requests for a paper card (by mail, coming with the green stamp and SASE), two for sending them a card image by email (which was our preferred / planned mode) and 26 requests by eQSL – a mode we were trying to totally avoid. Customers have spoken on that front – looks like we’re in the eQSL business now.  Important note: this is the highest percentage of contacts requesting QSL’s that we have ever had for a special event. We typically run about 30% requesting. For Pi/Einstein day we hit  61%, and we are very, very pleased to see that level of interest.

 Brief stats: 59 qso’s in about 6 hours of actual operating time on 3 shifts pretty much to sked. The 40m shift on Monday morning was abandoned for lack of activity, but otherwise the bands were satisfyingly active. 16 states worked overall. Two hams called the shack during the event to work a custom sked because they couldn’t hear us where we were operating at the time – Wahoo! on that front. If they’re interested, we’re interested for sure.

 Oh – yes – Pi(e) was available for operators and visitors: Banana Cream and Lemon Meringue. Special guest: Lucille, KD8PTE, who had just passed the tech exam.

 Finally, the ultimate reward: The QSL card Marge, KD8AIL made up for the event is shown above. After we saw the number of eQSL requests coming in, we adopted a design based on their technical requirements:

 QSO data and a comment will go across the bottom of the card. Got rapid feedback from a couple of contacts – they liked the card image a lot. One ham reported his grandson had memorized pi to 80 places and was really excited to hear there was a special event for Pi Day. We aims to please!

 The Activity Committee has recommended putting this event on annually based on the low effort / high satisfaction result.