ARRL June VHF Contest - 2021
Call: N2NT
Operator(s): N2NT N2NC W2RQ WW2Y
Station: N2NT
Class: Limited Multi-Op HP
QTH: FN20si
Operating Time (hrs): 27
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 510 133
2: 280 52
222: 51 18
432: 69 19
903:
1.2:
2.3:
3.4:
5.7:
10G:
24G:
-------------------
Total: 910 222 Total Score = 228,660
Club: Mt Airy VHF Radio Club
Comments:
Made a small improvement to the fixed 6m NE beam before this contest. This
antenna is deep in the woods to get away from solar panel RFI that kills the
main 6m rotatable antennas when beaming NE. We replaced 200’ of the 350’
coax run with ⅞” hardline. This reduces loss by 1 dB. Every dB counts.
The repaired Harris 6m amp (failed during the January contet) made it through
the weekend without a hitch. Nice.
Had new interference on 2m that looked like a 100 kHz wide, +10dB noise
“hump” that jumped around on the SDR spectrum. The first day it was
centered around 144.3 and didn’t cause too much grief. By Sunday morning, it
moved closer to 144.2. Later in the afternoon, we realized antenna direction
didn’t matter much for this noise -- a sign that something local to the shack
was leaking into the system. Spent an hour sniffing noise with an Airspy HF+
discovery while wiggling cables behind the Larcan 144/222 amp rack. This is not
fun as you have to crawl into a cramped space under a desk with poor lighting.
It’s hard to see what you are doing. The interference level would jump around
but no definite culprit. In an act of desperation, I disconnected all the
cabling to the 144/222 amp rack and wheeled it out (at least I was smart enough
to put connectors on all the cables years ago). I neatened up the mess of coax,
control lines, dc power and CAT5 cables behind the amp. When we put everything
together again, the interference was gone and stayed that way until the end of
the contest. This troubleshooting probably kept us off the air on 144/22/432
for about 3 hours, but hey, it’s not a VHF contest if you don't have to fix
something in the middle of the contest.
Nice coastal tropo Saturday night and Sunday AM. Worked K1MAP in FM14 on 2m
SSB, about 450 miles. Also worked N1BUG on a random 222 contact. Cool!
Didn’t spend too much time on ON4KST lining up contacts. It’s hard to keep
up with everything. Information overload already fills up 2 monitors on each of
our two operating positions.
Hard to use 2m FT8 for actual weak signals, especially when local enhancement
makes signals up to 150 miles out so strong. With SDRs more prevalent, maybe we
should consider using the entire 5 kHz of bandwidth that WSJT-x can decode on
FT8. Would be nice if people spread out more.
Nice to have W2RQ join us for most of Sunday. Bill probably caught the best
period of 6m E-skip.
Hope to do it again in September.
73 John N2NC, for the N2NT VHF team
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