Kansas QSO Party
Call: K0E/M
Operator(s): AD0DX
Station: K0E
Class: Mobile SO Mixed LP
QTH: KS
Operating Time (hrs): 17
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Dig Qs
----------------------------
80: 5 0 0
40: 72 14 0
20: 232 154 0
15:
10:
6:
2:
----------------------------
Total: 309 168 0 Mults = 42 Total Score = 53,046
Club:
Comments:
I really enjoyed the contest. It was great to have the chance to be K0E/M.
This was my first contest as a rover. Thanks to everyone for all the help
getting started. Special thanks to Bob W0BH.
We had an ft-857 with a little tarheel 2 antenna. It seems like this is a
great transmitting antenna. But it sure seemed like there were a lot of
stations that we could not hear, so I'm not sure how good of a receiving
antenna it is. This was my first mobile contest... is the tarheel 2 typical of
all mobile antennas for receiving on 20 and 40m? I'd be glad to hear others
thoughts on this. I understand it's a compromise because it is a shortened
antenna.
Originally I had not planned on working any county lines. I'm using n1mm and
it isn't really set up for a rover to sit a county line. But when I got to the
end of Jefferson county and saw the Atchison county line it was just too
tempting. At that moment I realized all I had to was to keep track on a piece
of paper ( on the clipboard on my lap next to the laptop) was the first and
last station that I worked on the county line. Then after I generated the
cabrillo file I could go in with a text editor and add in the additional county
for each station worked. This worked very well.
I had also planned to use a cable to key my rig from the ft-857 using n1mm. I
decided to first build a cable for my ft-950 at home and it took a while to get
this working. Unfortunately I didn't check the ft-897 until it was Fri
evening,and then realized that 950 has a 1/4 inch jack and the 857 has a 1/8
inch jack. So I did all the cw with a keyer.
We missed the turn for Jackson county and decided to just keep driving through
Atchison county because our goal was the far western counties of Kansas and the
eastern counties have lots of coverage.
We tried to work cw and phone on both 40m and 20m. For some reason we just
couldn't make hardly any contacts in Jewell county. But when we got to Norton
and Decateur we were quite busy. Sitting on the Decateur / Rawlins county line
was a real highlight. It was fun to hand out contacts to people and be the
first one to give them those counties. Living in MO, I don't get to work a
pileup very often.
We really had a hard time making contacts in Cheyenne county on Sat evening, so
we decided to go back on Sun am to give more people a chance to log CHY. My
friend/driver Bob had downloaded all the county maps for Kansas, so we located
the corner of Cheyenne, Sherman and Rawlins and decided to start there at 9am
on Sunday. This went well, and it was fun to give out 3 counties to each
person.
I was sitting on 3540 calling cq Sat evening from 8:40 to 9pm and only made a
few contacts. In hindsight I should have put this on my qrz web page to let
everyone know we would be trying 80m cw at this time.
We were sitting there on Sun am between these two corn fields and a farmer in
his pickup came along, he slowed down to see what we were up to, out there in
the corn fields of Kansas. We rolled the window down and said hi and explained
about being ham radio operators and that this weekend there was a contest for
people all over the usa, Canada and the world to talk to ham radio operators in
Kansas. We explained roughly that they get points for talking to someone in
each county in Kansas and that's why we were out here at this particular spot,
because it was the intersection of Cheyenne, Rawlins and Sherman counties.
Anyway he was kinda excited hearing what we were doing, wished us luck and
continued on his way.
About 10 min later a doe and her fawn came out of the corn about 20 yards away
from us... but we weren't hunting deer on this trip.
One great memory for me on the trip was after we left the 3 corners chy / raw /
smn, we were driving south in Thomas county to get back to the I-70. We are
driving through cornfields, and I'm trying to find a spot on 20m phone without
much success. N4PN gave me a call, I worked him and then he helped me move
down the band about 8khz to find an open spot. He was hearing a lot more
signals on the band than I was. I really appreciated him taking the time to
help me find a clear frequency to call cq on.
We also spent extra time in Graham county. And we were still working stations
when we came the Rooks county line. We stopped for 20 min(?) at the Rooks /
Graham county line and made more contacts.
The extra stops in chy / raw / smn on Sun am and also sitting at the
Rooks/Graham county line put us way way behind our original schedule, and so we
ended up the contest in Mitchell county.
I can see that time discipline while mobile contesting is a challenge, at least
it was for me because when you have a good run going sitting at a county line
to you want to keep it going and are reluctant to leave to keep on schedule.
The other thing we learned the hard way is that 20m sstv is 14230 to 14235,
which really cut down on our freq's when the Ohio and Hawaii qso parties were
centered on 14250.
The other interesting thing that happened was that late in the day on Sat, and
again on Sun, we could not bring the swr down on the tarheel. We kept notes of
the settings for each band and mode, and could not find the 'sweet' spot where
the swr was 1:1. We had to stop the truck and shut everything off for about 10
minutes, and after that we were able to get the swr back to normal. I have no
idea what caused this.
We also had a problem with the small inverter we used to power the laptop.
Around Sun at noon, the electrical noise was really bad. We looked outside to
find the problem. Again we stopped and shut the truck off, and then we heard
that the small fan in the inverter had kicked in and was causing all the
electrical noise. So we started up again and ran the laptop off the battery,
and plugged it back in to charge when we were off the air.
I did hear K0S on Sun afternoon on 20m phone but could not break through the
pileup.
It was also fun to work Hawaii on cw while mobile.
We had a great time. Special thanks to Bob / K1BBR for driving his truck and
providing the radios and the antenna.
Ron, K0E/M, AD0DX
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