Well, this years CQ WW VHF has come and gone. Condx. were mediocre the
majority of the time for me. 6 was spotty at best for Es, giving us
mini-openings at best. I was only able to work one station via Sporadic E -
W5LCC in DM93. 3 minutes after I worked him, he dropped back down into the
noise. Tropo was also a mixed bag for me. There was some enhancement on 6 & 2
from tropo. Signals on 2 were pretty good. No major long haul stuff, but
Jerry, WB9Z was stronger on 2m than the typical EN60 stations I work here from
the extreme northeast corner of EN52. Greg, K9KL in EN64 also had a very
strong signal here. When the enhancement was happening (mainly on Saturday
afternoon and night), I worked stations via tropo on 6m, that I normally have a
very hard time working. Bob, K2DRH, and I completed on 6, in what has to be
record time. I was only running 15W at the time. In the past, even with 100W,
it's often taken several tries to work him. In a nutshell, the contest condti
onswise, was almost like the ARRL UHF contest. Sunday was very disappointing.
The Hepburn tropo map indicated that we should get decent tropo today - that
wasn't the case at all. I also lost about 4 hours of operating time,when
several of my gabby friends decided to call me for long chats. Oh well.
Setupwise - I set up portable on my apartment balcony (I live on the 2nd
floor, on top of a hill). For 6m, I clip leaded the same rain gutter I use for
HF, and used a 6m antenna tuner. It was cheesy, but it worked. For 2m, I used
a 5 element 2m/432 log periodic from Elk Antennas on a homebrew stand. I wish
I could have done a pure QRP effort, but the Yaesu FT-620B I used on 6m was the
limiting factor. Like many rigs of its vintage (the late 70s & early 80s), it
has no power adjustment option. So, I was stuck with 15W of output. In
retrospect, I could have probably changed the internal ALC for 10W max, or
tricked it via the back accessory socket with a 9V battery (if I'd known what
pins to apply the voltage to [the manual gives no information on what pin does
what]), but I didn't feel like opening it up, to make a change for 1 contest.
As for 2m - I now am the owner of an ICOM IC-910H. I didn't feel like
disconnecting my only 30 amp power supply from the HF rigs, so I used an old
Astron RS-10A I've had since the late 80s,and throttled back the power from
100W, to about 20W (all the supply would handle - any more would cause it to
kick out). I had a tough choice between the IC-910H and the FT-736R (I had a
line on a few of them), but advice from a few other hams, convinced me that I
should bite the bullet moneywise, and get the IC-910H. It worked great for the
contest, giving me VHF & UHF capability, I haven't had in over 9 years (the
only VHF/UHF rig I've ever has that was even close to this rig, was the FT-736R
I sold back in 1999 to pay bills). Here's the run down of my semi-QRP effort:
6m 8 QSOs 5 grids
2m 19 QSOs 10 grids
Total 27 QSOs 15 grids
Score = 690 points
73,
Ellen - AF9J
_______________________________________________
VHFcontesting mailing list
VHFcontesting@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/vhfcontesting
|