Score: Murphy 15 K1WHS 2
It wasn't pretty. We had great plans to have a pretty nice weekend, but at the
last minute, the weather report changed for the worse. Saturday was blistering
hot, humid, and accompanied by thunder squalls. The squalls turned to steady
rain, and the temperature plummeted down so that we were all looking for fall
jackets and rain gear. It rained or drizzled from Saturday afternoon on until
the contest ended. The microwave antennas were not liking the rain very much.
On top of the miserable weather, with poor conditions, the stuff started
breaking. The six meter antenna hit the guy wires and knocked the rotor out of
whack several times. The 144 transverter croaked and we were reduced to running
FM and 25 watts on SSB for Saturday afternoon and early evening. We lost our
voice keyer and CW keying on 50 MHz due to computer problems. Then another
Tailtwister on 50 MHz seized up. The generator started leaking fuel oil.
(smelled real bad!) Then, when we got that fixed, it started fl
uctuating in frequency as a diode started shorting out the 24 vdc power buss.
I burned my hand trying to clear the red hot diode case from the 24 vdc line.
Then our air conditioner broke down and the microwave shack started to get
downright unbearable.
But Murphy was just getting started. Early Sunday morning we were greeeted
by a column of black smoke rising from the area of the generator, and then the
engine speed started to slow under load. The engine was also overheating. We
tried cleaning the oil bath air cleaner to no avail, and limped on for the rest
of Sunday, slowly reducing power on the amps as the generator got sicker and
sicker. Along about 6 PM we were down to 250 watts max output on the lower four
bands. At 9 PM it had it and we shut down, leaving ourselves in the dark. We
fired up our little gasoline generator and tried to stay on some of the
microwave bands to work a few more grids. The current draw was enough to cause
the OMNI V to shutdown on CW keying peaks. That little genset was protesting
loudly. We ended up shutting off the lights and using flashlights to see. We
did manage to coax a few more grids out under these conditions. All you people
who simply plug your rigs into the wall should feel very
fortunate. Making your own electricity is hard!
We quit at 11 PM after making a few microwave contacts into FN10. (903 thru
10 GHz) When we awoke Monday and tried to start the big diesel generator, it
would not even try to catch. All we can hear is clunking metal and a hard
working starter motor! It may be time for it's Last Rites.
The score is still open to question, as we also had a pretty awesome
network failure, and we are patching the log back up as best we can. Here is
what we ended up with:
BAND QSO GRIDS
50 457 84
144 393 63
222 147 36
432 210 42
903 84 27
1.2 95 28
2.3 71 25
3.4 57 23
5.7 49 23
10G 51 23
24 G 2 1
The score is a tad over 1.1 million. We were lucky to get that under the trying
circumstances and lost operating time.
Some of the ops included K1BX on 50 MHz, K9PW on 144 MHz, N2CEI on 222 MHz, The
higher bands were run by an assortment of ops including WZ1V, N1DPM, KA2LIM,
WA1T, K1DY N2BOW, and K1WHS. N1LBI was our chef again, and served up some
great food over the weekend.
So the station is dead in the water at this time. The power unit is rather
dead and we are not sure of the cause. We suspect a bad supercharged air
blower, which could be very serious as it could throw metal fragments into the
cylinders. I should get to look at it next weekend, and hope to find out what
is ailing it. You know, if there were some good conditions to anywhere, I might
have been cheered up. We didn't catch a break. I heard rumors that the tropo
was good a few hundred miles or less to our South. It did not reach us. That
thunder squall on Saturday marked a weather front that destroyed any tropo for
us for that weekend. Its going to take a while to recover from this! Sort of
like getting back to back root canals.
73
Dave K1WHS
ps.
How did we score two points against Murphy you ask? We worked a few European
grids on 144 and 432 when the moon rose at 4 AM. We snuck them in when he
wasn't looking.
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