ARRL January VHF Sweepstakes
Call: K2DRH
Operator(s): K2DRH
Station: K2DRH
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: EN41 IL
Operating Time (hrs): 31
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 130 51
2: 130 48
222: 58 33
432: 79 38
903: 18 15
1.2: 21 18
2.3: 10 10
3.4: 3 3
5.7:
10G:
24G:
-------------------
Total: 449 216 Total Score = 171,504
Club: Society of Midwest Contesters
Comments:
I approached this January VHF Contest with dread. The station was working well
except for an intermittent on 6M that worked fine on transmit and would give me
a normal SWR, but would attenuate the receive signal about 50% of the time until
I transmitted again. The weather has been active here in the Midwest with
unusual amounts of snow and nasty ice storms. A trip up the tower over the one
nice day during the Christmas holiday weekend was necessary anyway to clear
icicles off the microwave looper feeds and to unbend several crushed loops from
falling ice again. This is beginning to be a January habit!
I thought 6M was in the rotor loop jumper again so I went up a new one. It
would be easy to find since I had labeled all the coax by band with a Sharpie
permanent marker on labeling ty-wraps the last time I replaced them. Well,
so-called permanent marker ink weathers off ty-wraps pretty much within a year,
so I was left with a lot of blank labels! I had to go up and down the top tower
sections several times to isolate the 6M coax. While replacing the jumper I
inadvertently unscrewed the F/F N bullet from the main tower connector. It was
a good thing I did, because the stationary 7/8 hardline connector was definitely
corroded despite a good weather seal. Apparently when the rotor loop kinked
after the rebuilt motor ran backwards a year ago, water had leaked inside the
center and migrated down to the hardline connector. Iâ??d missed it by not
removing the N bullet then. Lesson learned, just because the top of an N
bullet looks good it doesnâ??t necessarily mean that the bottom does too!
I had another N bullet, spare half inch superflex connectors, solvent and tools
to clean connectors in my bucket, but no 7/8 connector or tools to remove it.
Of course, by the time I found it my fingers were pretty well frozen and the
sun was going down so I cleaned it the best I could and resolved to replace it
another day since I had a few weeks to contest time. It was not to be.
Between high winds, work issues, a bout with the flu and the extreme cold WX
(minus 31F) before the contest there was no way to get to it in time. It was
working OK and only cut out maybe 10% of the time now, so I was a wimp and went
with it. Of course later during the contest that 10% got worse and always
seemed to happen whenever an extremely weak signal called. I swear it would
time itself perfectly to cut out exactly the same part of the call I was
missing each time!
Conditions were dismal at best. Iâ??ve never seen the Hepburn tropo forecast
look so bleak before! Saturday was totally miserable with failures to normally
workable stations on 903 and above the norm rather than the exception. The
almost 60 degree temperature swing (minus 31 to plus 28 in one day) made the
power pole insulators sing in harmony! Iâ??d love to list highlights, but
there really were none, with the notable exception of finding KB9C/R (W9FZ/R in
disguise) in all four grids, however still missing a lot of the higher bands due
to conditions. You know itâ??s bad when you canâ??t work Bruce on 903 or 1296
at only 225 miles out! He was the one and only rover I worked all contest!
So the rovers mostly stayed home and the NAQP kept a lot of the others busy. I
find it ridiculous that the ARRL would sponsor two contests the same weekend
(NCJ is an ARRL publication) and I believe that this makes Saturday
participation much lower than it could be. Many good VHF stations here in the
MW will pass on the normally slow January VHF Sweepstakes in favor of the
faster moving NAQP. They are not mutually exclusive! After all, contesters
are adrenaline junkies who would much rather run a pileup than suffer through a
10 QSO hour!
Saturday was just awful. It never feels good to go to the WSJT skeds with only
170 Qs in the log. Fortunately the rox were really good for January and the
WSJT stuff went very well, with only one miss on 2M when the 6M sked took way
longer than it should have due to a major clock error. The multis seem to be
famous for poorly adjusted clocks, but most times itâ??s only a few seconds
off. This time it seems that one op was transmitting for 2/3 of itâ??s time on
the wrong sequence and only getting about 10 out of 30 seconds of the Tx and
listening time it should have! I manually sequenced so we had better odds and
we finally completed on 6M, but by then it was too far into our allotted time
slot to have any hope of working 2M before my next sked. I sent â??fix
clockâ?? instead â??QSY 2Mâ?? and I hope they saw and understood it, otherwise
all their other skeds probably went badly. Misadjusted clocks really mess up
the Rx sequence of other stations in your area when you are on the call freq as
well as reducing your chances of getting a random QSO going!
I stayed up an hour later than Iâ??d planned working random WSJT, mainly due to
the totally depressing score at that point. Made up for it a bit by working
Fred N1DPM on randoms, so I could at least set the alarm forward a half hour
since I didnâ??t have to meet him in the morning at 1200Z. But I accidentally
turned off the alarm when I reset the time, so I overslept and missed my
morning sked with K0AWU at 1230Z. Sorry Bill, my fault entirely! At least I
got some extra sleep! I was 10 minutes late for a 1300Z sked with K2YAZ to try
and recover the bands we couldnâ??t work Saturday due to conditions. Things
were not much better Sunday morning and only slightly improved during the
afternoon. It would take that morningâ??s sked and 2 more in the afternoon and
evening to finally work Bob up to 3456, my only 8 band sweep of the contest!
Participation was MUCH better Sunday morning even though conditions were still
pretty dismal. The pinpoint Es opening on 6M around 1400-1530Z into ME and
Canada was both unexpected and fun. Lefty K1TOL was 60 over for an hour. He
pegged the meter even with all my IF attenuation in, and was melting down my
front end! I wouldnâ??t be surprised if the bad connector was rectifying and
making things a lot worse too. Everyone I heard was at least 40 over except
for the few that called me from a couple other New England grids further south
that were a lot weaker. I called CQ in the only places I could squeeze, but
the ultra strong signals from ME bracketing me were overwhelming and made
receiving difficult. Despite how strong this opening was, I never heard any 2M
Es though. Of course my CQs attracted more locals than DX and picking them out
of the intermod, then leaving 6M to run the bands was really hard! But many
of them I knew I would never hear again and they offered a lot of points and
mults where the 6M opening was very limited in scope. I lost my run freq every
time and once landed back on 6M almost on top of K1TEO! Not a good place to be
when you run low power hihi!
So the morning was busy, but then the football games came on and it dropped way
off again. Even so, Qs were finally getting into the log. KB9C/R and I swept
all four Sunday grids on our 7 mutual bands. By 0000Z things really picked up
again. Many stations seemed to show up all at once. Iâ??m sorry if you called
me and I missed you since I was hearing lots of stations call in the background
but I couldnâ??t move the antennas fast enough to get to you all as we QSYâ??d
through the bands with several stations at a time, all at different beam
headings. Failed attempts at the higher bands with guys I can normally work
pretty quickly there didnâ??t help either.
Itâ??s definitely more fun, but its also somewhat disconcerting to suddenly
have dozens of stations calling from all different directions at once when you
are worn down from hours of dull daze CQing into mostly static and line noise,
struggling to pull out every dit. Iâ??d really love to have some 2M fixed
beams around the clock when this type of gang up happens since most of them are
too far away even for an omni stack! There was so much going on all at once
that I arrived at one high band makeup sked over 5 mins late and probably
missed that station because he left. Another one I was on time for, but left
after 5 mins since the pickinâ??s were way too good to wait any more than that!
As usual the end of the contest had some big surprises in store. Conditions
suddenly improved dramatically to the south and K4EQH in EM54 at almost 500
miles came barreling in at 20 over! This duct only lasted for a few minutes
but it was enough time that we took advantage of working on 432 and 6M too, but
had to do both on CW because it was marginal at best! No other stations were
heard (I sure miss Rex W5RCI SK already â?¦ he would have been there from EM44
to take advantage of this duct â?¦ plus he was a great friend). When Tom and I
said 73 on 2M again about 10 minutes later he was almost down to the noise
level. Making noise that way also produced some welcome last minute mults from
W9RVG, KA9UVY and W9DRB. When the final bell rang I was amazed to see that I
had done almost as well as last year when conditions were very much better!
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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