COLLEGIATE CHAMPIONSHIP SUMMARY SHEET
Contest Dates : 20-Nov-99, 21-Nov-99, 22-Nov-99
Callsign Used : N5XU
Operators : KT5I, W5JLP, KB5LBN, KM5FA
Category : Multi-Single
Default Exchange : # M N5XU 21 STX
Name : University of Texas Amateur Radio Club
Section : South Texas (STX)
URL : http://www.utexas.edu/students/utarc/
BAND Raw QSOs Valid QSOs Points Mults
__________________________________________________
80SSB 122 120 240 6
40SSB 32 32 64 0
20SSB 510 506 1012 16
15SSB 519 515 1030 56
10SSB 191 189 378 1
__________________________________________________
Totals 1374 1362 2724 79
Claimed Score = 215,196 points.
Equipment:
Kenwood TS-850SAT
Heathkit SB-220
Force 12 C-4 @ 100'
40M wire dipole fixed N/S @ 75'
80M wire dipole fixed N/S @ 75'
Heil Proset
W9XT DVK
TR Log 6.45
Dizzie Grizzlies
What an absolutely amazing start to the contest! In four of the first five
hours of the contest, we made more than 100 contacts. This is the best
claimed score for the club since 1989, when we placed in the top ten multi-op,
and it was all because of the first five hours of the contest. We started
out with a good three hour run by KM5FA on 15 meters, cranking out
102, 102, and 109 contacts, respectively. Kevin KT5I then took over at
0000UTC, had a 96 hour, and then a 117 hour, our best hour of the contest.
We never saw rates like that again, of course, and it was in those first
five hours that we gained all the ground over our score from last year. Our
best hour all day on Sunday was 67 contacts, and was actually a little slower
than last year.
We ran with just a single transmitter, the Kenwood TS-850SAT. Our Kenwood
TS-830S was hooked up to an AEA Isoloop antenna, intended mainly for people
not operating to listen around with, but I don't think it ever got turned on.
Maybe some day we'll get a two-radio set up going. The Heathkit SB-220 that
we had to take out of service in the CW contest was back with us. There
was probably a kilogram of dust inside the thing when we opened it up after
the CW contest. Cleaning it out, especially around the tube sockets, we
think fixed the problems we were experiencing.
The club's love-hate relationship with the TS-850SAT grew even more
complex this weekend. The TS-850SAT is _extremely_ sensitive to RF,
and has a very bad tendency to pick up RF on, say, the microphone cabling,
which remodulates with the mic audio and causes bad RF distortion over the
air. We had thought we had fixed it with gigantic type 77 ferrite toroids
on the DVK and microphone cabling, but with the amplifier healthy again
and pumping out more power, it appears that RF can get in through the
headphone lines as well, and that the toroids we had on those lines were
inadequate. Still, we were able to orient the cables in such a way that
for the most part, we could operate without RFI. Only once or twice during
the contest did we start hearing funky things on our voice peaks, and had
to fiddle with cable locations to make them go away.
We could never really get anything going on 10M. It was open, and it sounded
like a lot of stations were on, but we could never really get a good run going
there, even though we made 10M contacts in eight different hours on Sunday.
Our amplifier doesn't put out as much power on 10M as it does 15M or 20M,
and our antenna has only two elements on 10M, which I guess isn't as
competitive as two elements on 20M. 15M and 20M were our rate bands, and
we racked up over 1,000 of our contacts on those two bands. We avoided 40M
for the most part, but did reasonably well on 80M, with a 56 hour at 0500UTC
Saturday night.
Kevin KT5I had the best quote of the weekend. Referring (unbeknownst to the
San Diego section station with whom he was contacting) to an incident on
Saturday where he was caught logging San Diego stations as "SD," instead of
"SDG," Kevin actually said over the air, "I was dreaming last night that I was
in South Dakota, climbing orange trees, and not getting any points for it."
This was Louisa KB5LBN's first-ever HF contest. It was Johanna W5JLP's second
phone contest, and the first time she has tried her hand at phone Sweepstakes.
They operated together for a couple of hours on Sunday night. We also worked
several club alumni over the air, from exotic places like WWA, WMA, and STX.
We also discovered that our old callsign, W5EHM, was just recently reissued
as a vanity call to a ham in Mississippi. We looked him up in the online
callbook, a little befuddled as to why anyone would want that callsign
(considering what it sounds like in code,) and found out that the gentleman's
initials are EHM.
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Kenneth E. Harker "Vox Clamantis in Deserto" kharker@cs.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin Amateur Radio Callsign: KM5FA
Department of the Computer Sciences President, UT Amateur Radio Club
Taylor Hall TAY 2.124 Maintainer of the Linux Laptop Home Page
Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/
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