CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY
Call: AA5AU
Operator(s): AA5AU
Station: AA5AU
Class: SOSB/40 HP
QTH: LA
Operating Time (hrs): 13
Summary:
Band QSOs Pts State/Prov DX Zones
----------------------------------------
80:
40: 301 486 25 47 20
20:
15:
10:
----------------------------------------
Total: 301 486 25 47 20 Total Score = 54,432
Club:
Comments:
It was weird not doing a full blown effort this year. After Hurricane Katrina
destroyed both my towers, I guess I was lucky the ceiling in the radio room
didn't fall in from all the holes in the roof. I had taken my HF2 vertical down
before the storm and stored it behind my shed and next to the wooden fence. The
storm blew the fence over the vertical but did not damage it. It actually
protected it and it is the only HF antenna I have left.
Charlie, KI5XP, had graciously invited me to do a Multi-2 at W5WMU in Lafayette,
but Hurricane Rita changed all that. During the week of the contest, we kept an
eye on Rita and when we awoke at 4 a.m. Thursday to check her status, the
forecast track had moved east to the Louisiana-Texas border. With the track
moving east, I knew we had to leave our hotel in Lafayette, which had been our
home for two weeks. Lafayette was not a good place to be with Rita approaching.
So we started packing everything into my truck and Shay's car. At noon, we
blew out of town and headed home. We figured it would be safer there.
Thursday evening we arrived home around 3:30 in the afternoon and unloaded
everything. It was like a ghost town. Nearly everyone else had re-evacuated.
That night the wind started picking up. The next day we started getting rain
bands from Rita and there were several leaks in the roof that became apparent
with the hard squalls. Three different times on Friday I had to get up on the
roof and ended up putting on 4 more tarps in 40 mph wind gust and heavy rains.
At one point water was dripping into the radio room right next to the operating
chair and into my laptop! That was the last tarp that went up that day.
During a break in the rain I erected my HF2V vertical in order to operate the
contest. I checked the VSWR and it was flat. I continued looking for roof
leaks and the garage was taking on water, but I said the heck with it. Shay
cooked dinner and I started the contest at 0020Z. 40 meters was extremely noisy
that night, almost unbearable with all the thunderstorms associated with Rita.
I worked until 0430Z and made only 87 QSO's. Man, that was bad.
At 1000Z, I restarted the contest but the band was again very noisy. At 1211Z
that morning, I worked VQ9LA for my best QSO in the contest. I had never worked
the Indian Ocean on 40 meters at that time of the morning. It was an excellent
contact. I continued until 1300Z and had 148 QSO's. The weather was much
better on Saturday. The wind was still gusting hard, but we only had one line
of showers in the morning and the rest of the day was partly sunny.
I went to work cleaning up the destroyed beams by taking them apart and saving
all the stainless hardware and stacking the pieces of aluminum neatly into two
piles. I then removed all the transmission lines, rotor cables and phylistran
guys cables. It was then that I discovered one of the steel cables used as a
leader from the Phylistran to the ground anchor was frayed as if it had broke.
None of the Phylistran was broke. Only the steel cable on the east anchor
broke. This appears to the be reason the big tower fell. It then must have
fallen over the guy line of the smaller tower causing it to fall as it was not
guyed well from the east. Next time I guy a tower, I will use Phylistran again
but with a much larger diameter steel cable leader. I inspected each Phylistran
guy line and found no damage. Phylistran works! The wind at my QTH during
Katrina was sustained at 100 mph with 140 mph gusts. The towers survived
Georges in '98 and Ivan last year, but could not stand up to Katrina.
I removed both Yaesu G-800 rotors and collected my 80 meter inverted vee. The
80 meter wire was fully intact! It's been a great antenna and I was happy to
see it survive. I neatly wound it up and will reuse it in the future.
Something else that was strange is that the 6 meter beam did not get destroyed.
One of the 3 elements is slightly bent. This was weird because it was mounted
to the side of one of the towers and the tower landed on the one element but it
didn't break. I took it apart and put it in the shed.
After removing everything from the towers, I proceeded to pick up what seemed
like 10,000 pieces of shingle in the backyard. I wanted to cut the grass since
it was about 18" high, but it got too late. Shay fixed some of her great red
beans and rice for dinner and I restarted the contest at 0145Z and the band was
MUCH better Saturday night.
But it was slow. Not sure if activity was down this year or what, but it
difficult getting a run going even though I was running a KW. The vertical is
not as good as my rotatable dipole was at 62 feet, but it's not a bad antenna.
Running only one radio was really boring so I started drinking a few beers and
that made the contest a little more enjoyable. During the slow periods I
thought about what kind of new antennas I would put up. I made a goal that I
would have all new antennas up and be ready to defend my ARRL Roundup title in
January '06. This made me feel better, and along with the brew, I was starting
to have fun in the contest. I made a goal to work 300 stations in the contest
and at 0600Z I had 280 Q's. I then shut down and went to bed.
Sunday morning was really slow and there was much work I wanted to do on the
house, so I made my 300th QSO and then went to work repairing the holes in the
ceiling in the back bedroom and main bathroom. I came back in the shack during
the late afternoon. There were a few signals on the band, but only stateside
and I worked QSO number 301 and shut down for good. I then went out and cut the
18" grass in the backyard.
All in all a pretty good contest for me. I really appreciated every time one of
you fellow contesters would stop and say how glad you were to see me back on the
air. I got so many of those that I made a special buffer of thanks and to say
it felt great to be back. It really made me feel good. By the end of the
weekend, with all my work and all Shay's work, along with her sister and her
husband who are now staying with us (they lost their apartment in Katrina), the
inside of the house is looking like home again. It will be a long time before
things are even close to normal around here but I see light at the end of the
tunnel. It's strange not having but a couple of stores open and no cable TV,
but things will only get better.
Thanks to everyone for the QSO's. I'm glad to give out Louisiana because there
must not have been very many on. I worked 41 states but did not work Louisiana.
It was the first time in any contest that I did not work my own state.
The only good thing about losing my antennas is that now I will get even bigger
and better ones. And when I come back - watch out. I'll be better than ever.
73, Don AA5AU
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