IARU HF World Championship
Call: K1ZD/WRTC
Operator(s): K1ZZ K1CC K0TG
Station: K1ZD
Class: M/S LP
QTH: Wrentham, MA
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Zones HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
160:
80: 200 19 21 20
40: 440 58 40 31
20: 375 163 61 39
15: 211 22 24 22
10: 56 2 8 11
-------------------------------------
Total: 1282 264 154 123 Total Score = 1,337,356
Club:
Comments:
This was our second year of operating a WRTC test station after last year’s
successful event. We had a lot of fun last year. Dave K1ZZ brought his K3
and ProIII, INRAD triplexer and once again resurrected his vintage 1970’s M/S
manual 2x6 switching rack pulled from the shed. We used the same computers and
software �" what could go wrong? We invited John K0TG to join us, he’s
one of the W0AIH ops and was a referee at the 2006 WRTC in Brazil.
It was a hectic week before the contest �" Dave just returned from the
UK, I had been busy with WRTC site preparations (modeling, layouts, etc.) and
John had just flown in from MN the night before. Our preparation for the
contest was very limited at best. On the other hand, the Beam Team with
George W1ZT at the helm did a great job preparing the site at Rice and
organizing the logistics. We were several hundred feet from last year’s
location, which was moved to accommodate 3 operating locations for 2014 at that
site. Our immediate neighbors 500m away were FCG’ers Eric K9ES and Chuck
AD4ES who came up for the contest from Florida. We met W1ZT and Steve K1ST
who brought the tent and generator and we set up in record time. The weather
for perfect for setup, it was the coolest day we’ve had in weeks and mostly
cloudy.
Dave arrived at noon and in no time we were on the air �" except that the
triplexer wouldn’t work on 20. We couldn’t come up with any solution, we
resigned ourselves to doing a very crippled M/2. Ironically I had asked Dave a
few days before the contest if we should maybe get a spare triplexer since we
blew it in the last few hours of the contest last year. If this was a “real
competition” we would have. Message #1 to 2014 WRTC competitors: Test, test
and test before you come and bring spares if you can.
Dave left for home around dinner time while K0TG was offered the opportunity to
experience New England propagation in the tent all night, sleep was optional ;)
Before I left for the night we did some interstation interference checks with
our neighbors K9ES and AD4ES and confirmed that our 500m spacing was perfectly
fine on all bands.
At 6:15 AM we fired up the station to discover that the ProIII had intermittent
power output. It was definitely internal to the radio �" Strike 2!
Dave doesn’t give up easily, a call to his XYL Linda KA1ZD (after she woke
up!) resulted in a FT-1000MP delivered to us later in the morning. No
computer control, but it got us on the air. The final strike was just as the
contest started. Something happened in the N1MM setup and we had problem with
radio control in the K3. The function keys required an <Esc> before
pressing, it looked like we had 2 logging windows and neither worked right.
The software frequently gave error messages and required restarts and ESM
didn’t work (which I like to use). None of us are fluent in N1MM setup so
we hobbled all weekend with erratic keying, frequent errors and reboots
�" ugh!
As far as the contest, like last year, it was tough going until the afternoon
opening on 20. The Europeans have short skip until then and they’re all
working each other. It was mostly S&P, as expected. At 1 PM I decided
to leave Dave and John alone and set out for a tour of some the other WRTC
sites which I was eager to see in action, having been involved in site
selection and layouts with K1KI for the past 2 years. It was an opportunity
to get some feedback from the site teams and to check out additional 2014
locations with them. It was time well spent. I returned to the tent at 9 PM,
just in time to get on 80, which was fantastic, better than last year. Almost
every call to a European was answered as long as no other European was calling,
signals were loud with very little atmospheric noise. We tortured John about a
38 ft inverted-V on 80 with the ends almost touching the ground being better
from New England than all the hardware at W0AIH. Message #2 to 2014 WRTC
competitors: Don’t underestimate 40 and 80!
So we gave it our best shot this weekend. After all, it wasn’t a competition
anyway, except we weren’t planning on giving up our #1 spot from last year ;)
--- Rich K1CC
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