ARRL DX Contest, SSB
Call: KU2M
Operator(s): KU2M
Station: KU2M
Class: SOSB/20 HP
QTH: Wayne, NJ
Operating Time (hrs): 29
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160:
80:
40:
20: 1786 113
15:
10:
-------------------
Total: 1786 113 Total Score = 605,454
Club: Frankford Radio Club
Comments:
I have become accustomed to the bizarre occurrences around the area I live in
which I call The KU2M Triangle. Backyard ice glaciers, mysterious radio
phenomena, unexpected ice storms, vicious hurricanes, and visits by strange and
hungry New Jersey animals that like to eat antennas and cable are but a few of
the occurrences which have, over the years, contributed to making contesting
difficult, and sometimes, impossible.
As this weekend's giant Nor'easter storm approached, I prepared myself for the
worst: I expected, at the very least, that our power would go out just before or
during the contest, or a huge tree branch would come crashing down across our
driveway or that my Orion rotator's shaft would snap (again), allowing my top
antenna to windmill, tearing apart the coax and the control lines to the DB36
SteppIR (I can't describe what a complete joy it is to have to repair and splice
back together every wire of a 24-wire control line while your butt is hanging
out in the breeze, 115 feet above the ground). Imagine my surprise when, to my
bewilderment, an even stranger thing happened: NOTHING. Apparently, it was
another case of the KU2M Triangle, except this time, it was working FOR me, and
not against me. All around my QTH, there were downed trees, branches, ice, snow,
power outages and confused animals. Indeed, more than two days later, houses
right next to mine still have not had their power restored, but the only thing
that happened at my QTH was that one of my fixed antennas shifted about 20
degrees. That's it. No power outage. No brownouts. The top rotator didn't break.
No antennas were damaged. No animals ate through any of my feedlines. My tower
didn't come crashing down. All of these things have happened in recent years,
and I felt like the guy who walks out the front door of his house to find that
the houses to the left and to the right of his house have burned to the ground,
but his house is intact, without a scratch. Is this survivor's remorse? Perhaps.
But there is one part of my survivor's remorse I will not regret: the completely
unexpected benefit of quieter band conditions!
Usually, I have so much power line noise to the west and northwest that putting
the antennas in that direction for JAs and Pacific stuff makes the higher bands
sound like Frankenstein's Laboratory, with crackling, buzzing, horrible
electrical noise, none of which any noise blanker, noise reduction or special
listening antenna has been able to help. The Marquis de Sade himself could not
have invented a more insidious torture for the earnest contester who has to
listen through this cacophony while trying to run JAs. So, it was with great
relief that both Saturday and Dupeday (some people call it Sunday), when I
turned my top antenna NW for Japanese sunrise, I heard..... nothing. No
electrical noise... no crackling... no buzzing band saws. There was only quiet,
smooth, low level band noise. And something else, too: I could hear and actually
copy the calls of coat-hanger stations calling from JA ("coat hanger"
stations are those stations so incredibly weak that I assume, for lack of any
other rational explanation, that they must be using coat hangers for
antennas)... it was amazing. I could hear again. Was the problem fixed at last?
Well, yes, as it turned out, but not by the agency that's supposed to do the
fixing.
It wasn't until the next morning that the XYL told me that not one, not two, but
THREE giant trees crashed over up in the neighborhood to the northwest and took
out ALL of the power there, shutting down power to the arcing power poles and
thus also turning off Frankenstein's Laboratory! Yes- it was the proverbial ill
wind which, in this case, blew some good, at least in the KU2M Triangle. So...
I'll put up with the constant noise from my neighbor-from-hell's generator with
the bad bearings... it was worth it to be transported back, for one or two
magical evenings, to the way the band used to sound 30 years ago, before they
built all the homes over there and put in those noisy, arcing power lines.
Now if only I could only get the JA activity and the sunspots to be the same as
they were in 1988...
Yeah, I know. Fat chance.
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