V26P Score:
BAND QSO QSO PTS STATES/PROV
160 169 507 39
80 254 762 53
40 547 1641 57
20 1223 3669 59
15 1605 4815 59
10 1584 4752 59
-----------------------------------
Totals 5382 16146 326 = 5,263,596
SOLP CT says: 38.4 hours on.
This v26P story.
My plan was to be at 8P9P again for the ARRL SSB in 1999 but the
company I worked for announced last fall that I was being sold. I felt it
unfair to hold the 8P site. By February things appeared stable and the V26B
site was posted as being available. This started the V26P grand adventure.
To tell how short timing can be - on March 2nd at 6:50PM
the night before flying out I was sitting in a Church parking lot with a
cement trailer attached to the back of the Suburban pouring a cement
foundation for an eagle project bike rack. Nothing was packed. The plan was
to make the bank before it closed at 7PM for cash however I had miscalculated
having to hold the cement trailer in place with my truck while the pour took
place......
KT3Q - Sam made the trip worthwhile and helped set things up. Indeed many FRC
members provided insight and information on the site. Many went out of their
way to help make the trip and adventure a success.
TS850SAT & PS - Carried down in shoulder bag w/IRI narrow SSB filter.
Complete with W0GJ interface. A 19 ampere switching power supply. It doesn't
allow full power operation of the rig but it accepts a WIDE range of input
voltages automatically & instantly. If the power company sends 80VAC - fine,
they send 160VAC, fine. The rig gets 13.8VAC either way, no problems. Has
anyone ever modified the 850 so the transmit filters stay in line during
receive?
Computer - I logged with a 486 micro (not laptop) computer. It has one ISA
slot for DVP for rigs without a built in voice device. Roy (the site
caretaker) lent me a monitor. Built in battery that will run the computer for
abt a minute - enough to type savelog. I had loaded DOS 6.22 on this one and
had a terrible time since my diskcache would not work with 6.22 and smartdrv
didn't seem to cache the A: well for autosave of the log. So every 60 minutes
I paused as CT backed up. I'm going back to DOS 5 on this one.
Laptop - Another 486. Again battery backup on this one for 30 minutes or
so. The Monday before the contest I finally got the Win95 floppy upgrade.
Bad timing - win95 loaded and worked great but Explorer died. I wouldn't be
beat on this and spent too much sleep time fixing it. This would be the
logging computer if no monitor was found. Finding the monitor it would be the
audio recording PC.
RecAll - worked first time & was great. Loaded it up and it worked "out of
the box". This is software that recorded P40E's CW during cq ww cw. Ran it
during many parts of the contest. Sadly I did not fully understand the impact
of the local, powerful BBC station. Most of the playback is of the BBC
station and not the contest.
BBC station - I was warned about the local BBC station across the street from
the contest site. However my vision of this station was not correct. The
station supports seven (maybe eight) 1000 foot high towers with 100's of miles
of wire in directional arrays between the towers. The site consumes half the
island. The towers are very nicely laid out and wires touching one tower only
go to the adjacent towers. The BBC site contains MW's of transmitters
and spares for each band of operation. I heard Eimac makes a secret special
tube just for the BBC. There is a small nuclear reactor at the transmitter
site for power, no it's bigger then that. Fluorescent lights on VP2M light
up when they tune up the finals. Additional filtering in the antenna coax is
required to operate at v26b! (It is a big thing, perhaps maybe not 100% as
big
as described) This was a factor that lead to dropping HP operation and going
low power. I did not want to be HP and have a lot of people calling me that I
could not hear and would need to work to win HP.
Filtering - Each band required a bandpass filter. I had no means to
automatically switch out the band pass filters and I was already seeing the
time consumption to do so just in testing out the antenna farm. I studied the
WX0B switch on the wall - six antenna , two radio. I had just enough jumper
cables to place each filter on the antenna side of the switch however doing so
would not allow operation of an amp. This was a factor leading to going to
low power.
Amps - I hadn't carried down an amp but one at the site was made available to
me. One was a Alpha 76. It uses a pair of 8874's & I
believe was made pre HP 160. Quizzing some friends that had owned a 76 amp
raised doubts that it produced full legal power out on 160. The amps also ran
off 220vac and I had a concern over one part of electrical supply to the shack
on 220vac and this was another factor to going LP.
Antenna - There are monobanders for 40-10 on separate towers. It doesn't get
much better. The 4 element Force 12 on 10 @ 80' was amazing and played well.
The 402BA @ 89' ditto. These antennas got several comments of WOW that's loud
- however from east of W5/W0 land. There were also several comments from W5
land via email when I returned that my signal was weak and sometimes hard to
copy. 160 has a dipole strung from the 10 meter tower. I had setup a
vertical on 160 using the tower without a beam - it didn't play. Testing
Thursday night had reports that the dipole was the stronger antenna -
over 50% of the folks in the test did not even hear the vertical. Something
wasn't correct but I did not have time to find/fix it.
80 meters. There's a 3 element beam at V26B pointed at EU. One must hope
that perhaps this antenna can be repointed to the USA at least until you see
it. It's big. It's cut for CW. Which on another subject - I brought
my MJF antenna analyzer down this trip and BBC'ed it. For it to be any good I
had to use the outboard filters just like on the rig and even then I might
have to do the 80 during the day when the BBC was at higher frequencies. I
couldn't find where the elements had been folded back for SSB on the beam.
Roy and I talked about what the V26O CW group had done but something didn't
sound right. So we (kd5aau & I) went to the 15 meter tower where the 80
dipole is and routed the coax into the shack.
Then we returned to the beam and pulled the reflector back and away. Then
dropped the director and driven element and tied the ends together and lifted
them back into the air. This formed a loop up in the air that tuned out about
3850 khz. A quick addition of some wire on the east side got it down to 3800.
Testing the antenna that night showed the loop was better then the dipole and
the loop was much quieter on the noise. The loop was the only 80 meter
antenna used during the contest.
Beverages. A beverage transformer was installed on the USA
beverage and a coax run into the shack. I had brought a coax relay and setup
the relay so I could kick in the beverage as required. We checked the far end
resistor (that it's still OK) and set the transformer at 450 ohms. It looked
good on the MFJ. Had numerous problems with the coax relay & with no
additional filters to use the coax relay was taken out of line and did the
contest without a beverage.
This was perhaps one of sad items - I'd really like to try the beverage there
during the ARRL test sometime. (hint).
We. Shortly after President's weekend in Feb. American dropped their fare to
Antigua. We called the school principle to check if my son could miss 4 days
for an off site learning adventure. This worked and KD5AAU had a plane
ticket. He understood that cook was something he could do during the contest
- but no helping the SO. It was SO with kd5aau watching. He did great
helping with antenna, packing & cooking. Yes we found KFC!
When Friday noon rolled around it was fairly obvious that we would not have a
scheme to run high power or time to set it up. The Alpha never moved
from the storage table. Here are some thoughts from the actual 48 hour
contest:
Which band to start on? Always a good question, the real answer is always
seen after the test when everyone publishes their BRK file and we see highest
rate where. I tried 15 for 20 minutes or so then moved to 20. 20 was so good
I did not want to move to low bands and didn't hit 160 at the 0200Z gong.
VP2M I discovered that someone had gone to VP2M to operate. Pre-contest I
was concerned about this VP2M being the LP station to beat. Being off the air
for so long, many DX'ers would hunt this one and pileups on a packet spot
would be large. On low bands he might even get good runs going! Post contest
I heard VP2M? didn't have a 160 meter antenna and only a vertical for the
other bands. Not sure what happened at KP2? never heard him but HR6 put the
pileups on also.
Sleep - When sunrise started Saturday morning I realized I hadn't gotten any
sleep - took an hour nap before 20/15/10 opened to USA. Took six hours
Saturday night. Wasn't enough to make Sunday easy to stay awake or alert.
Ten meters - what a tease this band was this year. Over 1500 QSO's on day
one, about 60 day 2. Spent too much time day two checking 10 to see if it
would open. It was very nice to work a rare multi on 10 and in under 2
minutes have them on 20/15/10.
The low bands seemed noisy and I went back to the 40 meter beam as much as
possible at night. Could never get a 160 run going with the LP!
IT'S OVER - Amazing. After the contest one of the SOHP NA stations continued
calling CQ & making QSO's on 20 meters well past 0002 Z. Listening it sounded
like his clock was off and he thought he was OK. But USA stations answering
him should have no problem sycn'ing their clocks with WWV and knowing it's
over. Since the "time police" have been off - I would have also ignored them
as this station did but how do we tactfully let these types know don't do it?
Yes I written down calls during the test - if it ain't something that will
help the other station, it goes in the trash at the airport before I leave.
Finally - Let's see the BRK info:
73 W5AJ V26P - till next test
BREAKDOWN QSO/mults V26P Single Operator
HOUR 160 80 40 20 15 10 HR TOT CUM TOT
0 ..... ..... ..... 134/36 26/10 ..... 160/46 160/46
1 . . . 203/12 . . 203/12 363/58
2 . . . 194/5 . . 194/5 557/63
3 . 66/20 . 113/3 . . 179/23 736/86
4 2/2 . 109/31 . . . 111/33 847/119
5 59/17 . 13/4 . . . 72/21 919/140
6 . 39/5 . 43/0 . . 82/5 1001/145
7 12/3 5/3 21/4 17/0 . . 55/10 1056/155
8 ..... 10/4 69/4 ..... ..... ..... 79/8 1135/163
9 13/5 28/5 11/1 . . . 52/11 1187/174
10 . 35/5 63/5 . . . 98/10 1285/184
11 . . 22/0 . . . 22/0 1307/184
12 . . . . . 143/28 143/28 1450/212
13 . . . . 65/20 141/2 206/22 1656/234
14 . . . 1/1 144/17 42/2 187/20 1843/254
15 . . . 2/1 64/6 137/12 203/19 2046/273
16 ..... ..... ..... ..... 5/2 180/9 185/11 2231/284
17 . . . . 4/2 183/4 187/6 2418/290
18 . . . . 146/0 . 146/0 2564/290
19 . . . . 2/1 195/1 197/2 2761/292
20 . . . . . 194/0 194/0 2955/292
21 . . . 1/1 1/1 190/1 192/3 3147/295
22 . . . 25/0 . 114/0 139/0 3286/295
23 . . . 83/0 84/0 . 167/0 3453/295
0 ..... ..... ..... ..... 92/0 ..... 92/0 3545/295
1 29/3 5/3 63/2 . . . 97/8 3642/303
2 10/1 . 44/1 18/0 . . 72/2 3714/305
3 4/1 14/3 2/1 94/0 . . 114/5 3828/310
4 36/5 7/1 17/1 8/0 . . 68/7 3896/317
5 1/1 42/2 18/0 . . . 61/3 3957/320
6 . . . . . . . 3957/320
7 . . . . . . . 3957/320
8 ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... 3957/320
9 . . . . . . . 3957/320
10 . . . . . . . 3957/320
11 . . 11/2 23/0 . . 34/2 3991/322
12 . . . 36/0 11/0 . 47/0 4038/322
13 . . . 9/0 85/0 . 94/0 4132/322
14 . . . . 215/0 . 215/0 4347/322
15 . . . 4/0 87/0 12/0 103/0 4450/322
16 ..... ..... ..... ..... 89/0 3/0 92/0 4542/322
17 . . . . 47/0 20/0 67/0 4609/322
18 . . . 6/0 98/0 . 104/0 4713/322
19 . . . . 118/0 14/0 132/0 4845/322
20 . . . . 166/0 10/0 176/0 5021/322
21 . . . 71/0 49/0 6/0 126/0 5147/322
22 . . . 134/0 7/0 . 141/0 5288/322
23 3/1 3/2 84/1 4/0 . . 94/4 5382/326
DAY1 86/27 183/42 308/49 816/59 541/59 1519/59 ..... 3453/295
DAY2 83/12 71/11 239/8 407/0 1064/0 65/0 . 1929/31
TOT 169/39 254/53 547/57 1223/59 1605/59 1584/59 . 5382/326
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