Lessons Learned by K6UFO for ND2T(@K6MTU) ARRL RTTY roundup 2001:

Overview: 

It worked! That is impressive for a first attempt at a remote M2, with a powerful, complex station, with a new operator, and nobody at the shack to fix problems. 

To see how remarkable, read the numerous reports of people having trouble when their equipment is right there in front of them where they can access the buttons, menus, and cables.  Or read the report of the KT7E M2 who had problems even though that station has operated Multi-op many times before, and over half the operators were at the shack location! I have been involved in remote operation for over a decade now, and the reliable high performance of the K6MTU mountaintop station it is a testament to the skill and dedication of Kevin K6TD. He didn't even have to drive up there during the contest to fix anything!

Excellent score: Our original target the week before the contest was to pass our 1800 QSOs of last year. Then it appeared that M2 was really going to work, and we added a skilled operator, and our big, audacious goal increased to 2000 Qs. We easily passed that Sunday with still 4 hours of contesting to go!

The details and quibbles:

The M2 filtering was great! I ony saw any noise from the other radio when the 15m band was extremely weak, and I increased the RF gain - and could then hear the 20m transmit in the change in noise.  I did not see any interference on 20/40 or 40/80. This is great for a single-tower station where all the antennas are close together.

Amplifiers provided a few worries. We thought we would only have one, but with 4 days to go, the SPE 1.3 was returned, installed, and Kevin got it working.  During the contest, the SPE had problems with running too hot, and it took attention to keep the power down to keep the temperature down. We really didn't want to lose an amplifier!  The other amp, the KPA1500, was more reliable, but on 20m the SWR reported by the amp is far different than reported by the WaveNode wattmeters out toward the antennas. Maybe a problem with the 20m filter? 

"Single-user" view and control of the rotator is an issue when there are two 
operators using two bands and two antennas. It would save a lot of coordination if each op could always see the position, and either op could submit a move. 

It would be nice to be able to use the lower ring antenna OR the top(triplexer) antenna. Could then point separately from the other band.

Everything works, but there's so much of it! (VPN, Slack, SmartSDR, DAX, ptty and aswc commands, rotator web pages, tightvnc, amplifier utilities, Writelog, Internet logbook, MMTTY, 2Tone, Digirite, ve7cc cluster, ...)
I wish we could streamline to less interfaces and less access methods, like to put everything possible on one remote desktop, to automatically setup and automatically switch things when possible, or have a webpage with a list of check boxes to proceed through, that then configures antennas for you. Just some way to make it easy and less error-prone. Right now, it requires a lot of attention to get started up or make changes, and hard to make changes while running a pileup.

Switching operators still has a few fumbles between the logging program, 
SmartSDR software, DAX, amp setting, antenna selection, etc.  We lost a few minutes and our run frequency each time. I think we could avoid some issues by keeping each operator to the same radio as much as possible, eliminating changing from U-U to D-D, ...  Also try not to switch operators AND bands at the same time? Switch ops and solve the issues, then switch bands and solve those issues. If more of band-changing could be automated, we would be able to start doing "10 band changes an hour", to chase Mults.

As expected, the QSOs were 90 percent from North America, but half the Multipliers are elsewhere. So the rate suffers while Mults are chased.
We didn't do mult-chasing the first day, and so had to chase extra hard the second day, right to the last minute. We might have had more awareness on day one to get any "rare" mults. It would also be useful to have another receiver or way to verify that a Mult can actually be heard before moving the transmitter over to try and work them, more like SO2V.

In the last hour, FT4 was surprisingly active and had good rate, compared to the then low rate on RTTY or FT8. 

But those are only quibbles and suggestions, the big picture is that a powerful remote station became M2 capable, and 4 operators ran it remotely to a high score and record. Well done!

Mark K6UFO