CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW
Call: K5NA
Operator(s): K5NA, K5DU, N3BB, K5WA
Station: K5NA
Class: M/S HP
QTH: STX
Operating Time (hrs): 46
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 63 19 58
80: 172 28 112
40: 546 36 132
20: 865 36 147
15: 308 27 115
10: 31 15 24
------------------------------
Total: 1985 161 588 Total Score = 3,842,370
Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club
Comments:
Murphy usually doesn't usually bother us too much here at the K5NA station, but
this time he showed up big-time.
About 0200Z the second day (Saturday evening local time) the commercial power
went completely off while a major cold front was passing through the area. We
could see lights in the distance but since we live in the country we were not
sure if it was just us or whether it was our general area suffering an outage.
The cell tower next door was lighted, but it might have been on emergency
back-up power. We were not sure how local the problem was.
A call to the power company's trouble reporting line got the general "push one"
and "push two" menus. No human being wanted to talk or acknowledge us on
Saturday night. We reported the problem and hoped someone would check into it
soon. Their priority would be set by how many complaints they got and we were
not sure of how many, if any, other homes were affected. Their automated
call-in system would offer us no reassurance or target for getting our power
back.
I proceeded to set up my little Honda generator on the back porch and 1.5 hours
after losing power, we were back on the air using emergency power. The little
generator wasn't big enough to power the amplifiers, just a couple of barefoot
rigs and their computers. For the next 13 hours we ran the two computers and
two rigs barefoot doing the best we could. The little generator grunted,
groaned, and strained but it was keeping us on the air.
One scary moment occurred when I thought I would power up and add the third
station and computer to the generator's load. The instant I turned on the third
rig, the generator made a loud beep and stopped running. My thought was "Oh no,
I just overloaded and destroyed the generator". But instead, the generator had
picked that precise moment to run out of gas. What a relief.
The regular power came back a little after 1500Z (9:00 AM local) and we quickly
brought the amplifiers back on line after not using them for 13 hours. We had
suffered with low power all through the night on the low bands and had lost a
lot of multipliers that we would have ordinarily worked. It certainly made me
more appreciative of what the LP and QRP guys have to endure. Our weekend
contest ended up with these extra statistics on station availability:
Full station capability - 35 hours (73% of time)
Limited station and low power - 11 hours (23% of time)
Off the air for emergency setup and refueling - 2 hours (4% of time)
Maybe we should buy a bigger generator with 240V availability for the next
contest? Who knows?
Here's the rest of the story.
The low bands were terrific the first night. By sunrise the next morning we had
100 countries on 80 meters and 50 countries on 160M. These were the best first
night numbers from here that I can remember. We had high expectations of also
doing well the second night before the loss of power took away our low-band
competitiveness.
20M and 40M were the money bands though we never really had the great JA runs
that we hoped for.
15M was less than average with the openings being briefer than normal and only
the higher powered and better equipped stations from Europe coming through. No
JA runs were had on this band.
10M was almost totally nonexistent and was the worst I remember for any contest
during this cycle. I think we are truly at the bottom of the cycle now. It
certainly can't get much worse than this.
We had a small team of operators trying to keep both the run and the multi
station manned. I admit that when we lost our commercial power, all of us lost
some of our focus and enthusiasm needed to carry on at 100% effort. But
somehow, we all trudged through it without giving up and we did the best we
could.
73, Richard - K5NA
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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