California QSO Party
Call: N6DE
Operator(s): N6CCH N6RC N6TU N6DE
Station: N6DE
Class: M/MCntyExp HP
QTH: SIER
Operating Time (hrs):
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs
--------------------
160:
80: 158 88
40: 236 326
20: 476 521
15: 160 467
10:
6:
2:
--------------------
Total: 1030 1402 Mults = 58 Total Score = 341,852
Club: West Valley ARA
Comments:
Sierra County expedition
5300' elevation
2 SSB stations, 1 CW station
Site layout:
http://public.fotki.com/n6de/cqp/cqp2010/antenna-layout.html
3 Elecraft K3s
ACOM 1010
Heathkit SB-200
mobile amp
Force12 C3S
Force12 EF-415
Homebrew 2-el 20m hammock
2 tower trailers
Yamaha EF2400iS generator
2 Honda EU2000i generators
For some pictures of our site, including the HFTA analysis plots, see:
http://public.fotki.com/n6de/cqp/cqp2010/
Operating time:
Station 1 SSB - 22 hours
Station 2 SSB - 17 hours
Station 3 CW - 19 hours
Thanks to:
N6CCH, N6RC, and N6TU for joining me. Special thanks to Rebar for all his help
with setup and teardown.
West Valley ARA for their tower trailer
W6OOL for his tower trailer
KF6T for the design and working sample of his 2-el 20m wire hammock
K6TD for loaning us equipment
K9YC for publishing helpful info on line filters and baluns
The goals of this expedition were to have fun and kick butt. The only marker I
wanted to exceed was my S/O score from this location in 2009. We accomplished
it all!
I think I have found a great M/M CQP expedition location. There are two
clearings at this site that are 1000 feet apart and 80 feet different in
elevation. I was really interested to see if we could have CW and SSB stations
on the same band at high power without interference. We tested 15m and 20m at a
time when the bands were dead so that we could hear any noise from the other
station. The result was amazing. With the K3 and the antenna separation, we
could coexist without any perceptible increase in the noise floor! We did hear
our 20m CW station at S1 on a couple of discrete frequencies in the 20m Phone
band, but that was easily avoided. We didn't test 40m, but during the contest,
we found that we could also operate CW and SSB simultaneously without a problem.
Even though the CQP rules don't require it, we set up all our radios and
antennas within a 500m diameter circle, which is the definition set by ARRL and
CQ contests for transmitters and receivers.
I wanted to participate in the Friday practice, but we were putting up the CW
tent at the time, with a lot of setup work still left. We had S5-S6 line noise
on 20m and S2 noise on 15m from Dick's Honda EU2000i generator. After
installing a line filter, it went down to S2 on 20m and was gone on 15m. I
added a few ferrites and clamp-ons to attenuate the noise a little further on
20m. I put line filters on all 3 of our generators.
Conditions on 15m this year were really good. The 4-el 15m yagi performed
well. We were spotted by two Europeans on 15m Phone:
TF8GX 21323.7 N6DE CQP strong ! 1655 02 Oct
EA6AZ 21347.5 N6DE 1720 03 Oct
Is it my imagination, or were the pileups generally not as deep this year
compared to last year? It just seemed like the endless supply of casual
stations on 20 PH was not there this year.
There was great representation from all the mults this year. We had at least 2
contacts with every multiplier. We had 151 DX QSOs (non-VE/KH6/KL7). We
contacted 36 DXCC entities.
We had our share of problems: pounding heat during setup, flies, mosquitoes,
rain on Sunday and Monday teardown, exhaustion, too tired to operate, not
enough prep work on antennas before the expedition, putting up low band
antennas during the contest Saturday, no time to put up an 80m CW antenna,
loaded the 75m antenna with 100W on 80m CW, spent time during the contest
setting up a CW interface on a Phone station for 80CW, I was a VHF lid and
wasted time trying to hit 2m repeaters for talk-in, the CW station ran low
power for several hours, also unknowingly duped some stations on Sunday due to
accidentally changing our operating county in Writelog, etc.
But we still had a great time, enjoyed each other's company, and had a
memorable expedition! What a gorgeous area of California this is, with a
stunning view of the stars at night.
Thanks to all of you for contacting us!
73...
-Dean - N6DE
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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