ARRL 160-Meter Contest
Call: N9NB
Operator(s): N9NB
Station: N9NB
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: VA
Operating Time (hrs): 29:30
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 895 Sections = 74 Countries = 11 Total Score = 149,770
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
It's fun to be getting back into contesting after a 25+ year lapse from the
sport. It's been a blast designing the station (doing more dreaming than actual
work over the past few years), and it's been fun getting the cobwebs loose with
real-contest experience and code practice, and relearning ham radio propagation
fundamentals and the call signs of old and new friends.
Having entered the CQWW CW and ARRL CW earlier this fall, and now this contest,
I am starting to finally get the hang of computer-based logging, and am starting
to learn how to make my station play. This felt like my rookie year for
returning to contesting.
Sure glad I put down some radials this past summer. For this contest, I had a
few moments on Friday afternoon to throw up a 140' wire (60' from the ground to
the support rope, and then the rest of the vertical sloped out, somewhat
parallel to the ground to a tree) to complement my 35' inverted vee on 160, and
the vertical tuned well. I quickly found out in the contest that I would have to
use the low dipole as a "local" high angle TX/RX antenna (the vertical
swas much weaker) and I had to use the low dipole as a receiver antenna (all
switching is manual, which got old after the first few hours). But man, that
vertical worked well on longer distance transmissions - playing with the
antennas during the contest revealed that the vertical was much better to DX
and west coast stations, every time. I also used polarization combining
(combining both the vertical and the dipole on transmit as well as receive,
mainly transmitting with both polarizations and listening just on the low
dipole). I have no beverages or loops, and can really see how they are a
"must have" on top band for reception (next summer's project),
although the low dipole really impressed me as a low noise receiver option -- I
might also try to build a low-prolife antenna that I built in college (that, I
recall, offered super low noise reception and very effective, as well). ..
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the station worked. With my
newfound experience and with some better sleep management, I should be able to
improve on this score. Sleep management is something I have to work on -- for
all contests this past fall, I slept too much the first day (6 hours or so),
and then stayed up for the entire 24 hour period the second day, which makes me
too tired at the end of the contest.
Some funny anecdotes for this contest: Having been completely out of touch with
top band, I missed even trying for DX the first night -- for some reason I
thought DX didn't really matter -- and I forgot the difference between San
Diego (SDG) and South Dakota (SD)! I also forgot about the DX window - thought
its was lower in the band (!). This contest felt like Sweepstakes, but in a
tiny 80 kHz band. It really is great fun, but you really have to "muscle
in" to find a CQ frequency. I found myself continually being squeezed
between two big gun stations after managing to find a run frequency...reminds
me of people coming onto the subway in New York during rush hour :-). But all
the operators are quite respectful, very cordial, and the serious operators are
quite excellent, with excellent sounding signals ..it sure is a fun contest!
We had an ice storm hit VA during the wee hours of Sunday, starting around 4am,
and I was somewhat sleep deprived at this point -- things got weird around 5am
after the XYl asked that I take a break to move the car down to the bottom of
the hilly driveway (just in case the ice made our departure difficult
later)....After getting back to the shack, I began to notice that my VSWR
continually increased and my power continued to decrease during the final hours
of my operation, and I suspect this was from ice forming and growing on my
antennas..that was a hoot, but then I became very concerned when all the lights
on my stack matches all of a sudden began to illuminate in unison with my CW
keying at around 7am-- it was like a primitive rock band light show -- this
happened at about the same time I heard the band change instantly in a very
weird manner.....Through my headphones, I heard a weird ripping sound for about
2 seconds, as if someone was slowly unzipping a jacket over the air, and after
this very bizzare and super loud zippoing sound, I had incredibly loud S9 + 20
line noise everywhere on the band! I thought that maybe the DSP in my FTDX5000
went unstable (its a new rig for me and I love it, it continues to suprise me
in very wonderful ways, so I assumed this too might be a new aspect of the
receiver)... I turned off the RX, waited a second or two, and turned it back on
-- and the S9+20 line noise was still there across the band. It was virtually
impossible to hear for a 20 minute stretch, and then, just when I was thinking
of calling it quts, I heard another 2-second zipping sound through the
headphones, and things reverted back to normal with little noise (!). All I can
guess is that the ice was doing something on a nearby HV power line...maybe
forming and then melting after it shorted out? I wonder if others have ever
heard anything like this - was this the band, or my receiver?
At the end, it was all a bit surreal, somewhat dream-like, and I attributed all
of this weirdness to the ice storm that was happening outside, but then at
7:30am, I found that I had a very loose PL259 going to my coax switching box in
the shack (I started the contest in a rush, and had forgotten to tighten it!
This was the cause of the LED light show in the shack -- ). I made my last qso
at 8:01am and immediately QRT'ed at the insistent requests of my XYL to prepare
the house and driveway for the ice, which had now become a greater concern.
Thanks everyone for the QSO's and to the ARRL for this fun contest. Top band is
quite an amazing band! During the contest, I could not help but think of Marconi
and the many early pioneers of wireless who demonstrated the viability of
transoceanic communications near this part of the spectrum at the turn of the
20th century. What a great hobby this is!
73, ted
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