ARRL DX Contest, SSB
Call: VP2E
Operator(s): VP2E N5AU
Station: VP2E
Class: M/2 HP
QTH: ANGUILLA
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 63 24
80: 370 45
40: 650 56
20: 1944 61
15: 1111 57
10: 101 23
-------------------
Total: 4239 266 Total Score = 3,377,934
Club: North Texas Contest Club
Comments:
This contest will always be remembered as the "yoyo" contest at VP2E. Our
normally reliable commercial power went up and down about every hour Friday and
Saturday. There was obviously major trouble on the power grid. We finally
elected to operate on the 20KW generator for most of Saturday to avoid these
little surprises when everything goes "lights out" in the middle of a QSO.
It's possible our log could have lost two or three QSO's when this happened in
the middle of an exchange before we could hit the enter key. All previous
QSO's entered were safe.
Saturday evening the commercial power was back up, and with diesel fuel running
low, we went back on the mains. We just had a good run started on 160 when it
went down again. We looked at each other (with flashlights) and decided to
pack it up for the evening. Sorry we couldn't work more stations on 160 or
80. Next time.
Sunday morning the power stabilized and we made the entire day with no further
incidents. We have lots of wind now and it's shaking the power lines.
This may be part of what happened to the lines on Friday and Saturday, but it
definitely contributes to bad power line noise until we can find the loose
hardware. With the island power in question, fixing line noise will never be
on the priority list for the electric company, of course. We had to stop
running on 15 and 20 several times due to S9+ noise. If you were loud, no
problem, but many stations are not so strong and keep calling, wondering why we
can't hear them. Not a good situation so we went QRT many times.
10 meters was completely dead until late Sunday afternoon when we got a Pacific
scatter opening. We turned the antenna direct path and everything was gone
except the S9+ noise. Fortunately the Pacific scatter path was away from the
noise, so we could hear a little better. We ran 100 Q's as fast as we could
to take advantage of what little opening we had and managed to work several of
the big east coast multis along with the southern states from coast to coast.
Some of the central states were very loud, but most callers were tiny signals
in the background, even from stations we know have huge antennas.
The WinTest software worked perfectly and most of the hardware did the same.
With all the other problems, we are certainly glad this was a 2-man non-serious
effort. Let's hope the gremlins got it out of their system on this one and
will leave us alone when it becomes time to get serious.
Glad to pass out the VP2E multiplier once again. We might still be here for
WPX SSB. If so, see you then.
We have a lot of antenna work to get done, so some contests may be passed over
to allow this to happen.
73
Ray VP2E
Gordon N5AU
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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