Some notes from the K1KI M/M ARRL DX CW weekend:
It was nice to finally not have any antenna work to do the day of the
contest! Went to pick up my car at the shop (new fuel pump = no new 20m
beam), which wasn't ready, and new glasses (getting old, time for bifocals),
snow flurries started at 1 PM on the way home. By 2:15 there was 3" of new
snow. By 5 PM the total was 8" and by the midnight it ended at about 12".
One crew member dropped out because the drive was bad at mid-afternoon, six
arrived from 4:30 to 6 PM (several arrived many hours later than planned).
Two made it in the next morning.
In the morning, the only way up the driveway (8/10 of a mile into the woods)
was by 4-wheel drive, even after it was plowed around 4 AM, because of the
drifting. Les, KG1D, managed to barely make it in his 4WD, Mike, W1OD,
turned around when the snowdrifts were higher than his car. His new IC-706
(-708?) came in handy when he called us from the end of the driveway on 20m
cw to ask for a rescue.
As others have noted, the snow static was real bad, though it was loudest
about 90 minutes before the contest started. That plus the normal QRN
generated by a storm made for some tough times during the first night. The
40m sloper heard much better than the 2L@120' on 40m!
Rich, K1CC, and Al, KF2FB, teamed up on 40m this time. Rich was "promoted"
from 80m so I could take time off from 40m and do all those things a host
should do instead of hogging the radio, plus I wanted to operate on 160 this
year. Despite the QRN and poor nighttime conditions, it looks like we're
still very competitive on 40m. Much of the time both Rich and Al were
listening to the same frequency, sometimes on different antennas, sometimes
on different radios, sometimes both. It made a difference in picking out the
weak ones.
JP, AA2DU, pulled 80m duty this year. We didn't tell him that 80m was a
cursed band here so he never knew any better. In previous years something
always went wrong with the 80m antenna, usually just before the contest so
there was little chance of repair. The weekend before the contest there was
in intermittent connection on the new 80m 4-square. After lots of tramping
around in the woods, we (I can't even remember who else was there now)
disconnected two of the phasing lines, trimmed a couple of the verticals, put
everything together and declared victory. Turns out we never did figure out
what was really wrong but things worked when we finished. Well... Friday
night the 80m antenna developed an intermittent again, causing the Alpha to
kick out many times. So, there I was at 9 PM without my boots (snow now 10"
deep on top of about a foot that was there to start with). Squeezed into my
wife's snow boots (not a good solution but, this contesting stuff is serious
business!) and went out to find the elusive problem. Wiggled some cables,
tightened some catenaries, took the cover off the phasing box looking for
melted components, cursed, froze, and declared victory. JP said it was
better, but he used the Force-12 dipole for part of the night, not knowing
which way it was really oriented. About sunset on Saturday as 80m started to
warm up the 4-square crapped out again (bad swr, plus LEDs in the phasing box
not working). This time it was 10 degrees out and 25 mph winds. Back into
the mini-boots, back out to stalk the wild snark in the snow, this time W1OD
was shivering with me. We focused on one phasing line, decided it had either
a bad coax connector or water in the coax. Now it was dark and cold...
disconnected the cable (wind blows out propane torches....) and brought it
inside to replace the connector and warm up. When it was reconnected the
problem was still there. Now I'm POed. Last resort, maybe it's a problem
with the hardline coming into the house (300' run). Off comes the coax from
the lower 20m beam (it was pointed south, band was almost dead, who cares?)
and we use it instead of the hardline. Nice to see 300' of Radio Shack (it
cost me $30/500') RG-8 put to good use. It worked! Somewhere my hardline
has a problem, probably where I have transformers at each end. Bottom line,
we've never had a better 80m score (we beat LPL's crew!). JP done good.
Good mults included 4K8F 9J2BO 9R1A 9U/F5FHI FR/DL1DA OD5/SP7LSE R1FJZ/FJL
Z2/DL5AWI.
Joe, KM1P, started out on 160 while we were doing antenna work in the
blizzard. It only took about 5 hours to beat our 160m score for the whole
weekend from last year. The antenna work has finally paid off. I got late
night duty on 160 so Joe good rest up for the big rush on 10m in the morning,
fill in on 15 and dig out those multipliers. Our 156 x 50 the first night
was almost as much as the other M/M groups had for the weekend. The 4-square
had S9+10 noise most of the night but the Beverages pulled a lot of signals
through. 9A1A was the beacon on 160, they started to be heard about an hour
before sunset each night. It was painful to hear UK8LA near the end with 559
signals and unable to hear the dozen USA stations calling. Good catches
includes 5X4F A45ZZ LU4FM TA2BK TF3DX/1 TU5A and two JAs the first morning.
We heard a bunch of JAs the second morning but only the W2/W3s got answers.
Also, we heard VK5GN 559 the first morning and 339 the second, but no QSO.
Twenty was the money band as usual, with Dan, K1TO, doing iron-man duty as
Mr. QSO Machine. The high antenna 5L@133 was the best one for most of the
weekend, except Sunday afternoon the 4L@66' fixed on Europe was much better
than any other single or combination of antennas (options are 5/4/4 at
133/99/66). Pretty miserable overnight, but we heard LPL and LR going all
night long on a very empty band - that's what brings in a few things we miss.
Dan snuck onto 160 Friday night and found the going pretty good but gave it
up so he'd be fresh for the morning rush hour on 20m. One of the most useful
things on 20m during the day was for a second station (160 or 80 for example)
to listen on the band using a Beverage and spot everything heard. That meant
others in the club got the some things we were hearing, plus it filled up the
CT band map. That's important because CT (and presumably N6TR's program)
filters out those that aren't needed or highlight those that are needed. Dan
could quickly move to one he needed (QSO or multiplier) with Alt-F3, or use
the second receiver in the FT1000D to listen first. He was in and out of
pileups or runs in seconds, before the crowds grabbed his run frequency.
With lots of packet spotting at other stations, or by others in the club,
there were always new stations to go after in the band map. In the end, an
improvement over last fall, but still a shade under the big numbers from LPL.
Pete, W1RM, came ready to go on 15 meters. Remembering the 1180 QSOs on 15m
last year he found it tough going Saturday morning, then noon, then
afternoon. Somehow it wasn't any better on Sunday, except for a brief hour
or less late in the morning (15Z, 43 QSOs). No JAs, and a weird ratio of 84
countries to 232 QSOs - one new multiplier every three QSOs! There was a lot
of time for listening and tuning, and no propagation to western Europe where
the numbers are. Just 117 Europeans and only 7 DLs.
The 10m torture operation was manned by Mike, W1OD, with fill-in by several
people after Mike caught is limit of five LUs. It didn't help that the only
direction with significant powerline noise is towards the Caribbean and South
America. Awful! I don't know how we even managed the ten QSOs and three
countries we got each day on 10m. Plus, when the main antenna (5L@65') was
pointed towards SA, it was pointed right at the house. That caused the
FT1000 on 20 (and 80) to loose touch with the computer (some connecting cable
must be resonant) and do weird things.
I think this was the first time we had more QSOs on 160-80-40 than on
20-15-10.
Hope that gives you a little more flavor of things here. We had a great time
and the coordination between different operators and bands worked well - we
still need to pass multipliers more and do more spotting though. It's
amazing to see my two TS850s and Alpha86 supplemented by a range of others in
the week beforehand (we worked the Sunday before on antennas and a little bit
inside, but did most of the rest on Wednesday night). Borrowed equipment
included two spare TS930s, TS850 TS870 TS950 plus the two FT1000Ds mentioned
above, and added amplifiers were an AL-1200, two Titans, Alpha87 and Alpha76.
Add in a few W1WEF CW interface cables and we had seven computer controlled
radios and a network that was very bulletproof over the weekend.
Things to do (you made a list also, didn't you?):
put a tribander in the woods 500' away from everything else for
spotting towards Europe
buy some filters to keep the household telephones RFI free
get some pre-amps for the Beverages, when they are split for two
stations the signal level drops too much
see if we can talk more people using the spotting network into
spotting more themselves
find out how W1CW was connected into the YCCC packet network from
Florida
see if K3LR really is finding a way to hear YCCC spots
find out how LPL always beats us in multipliers
be happy with lowband conditions from the northeast!
cut down some telephone poles...
make sure every operator really knows how to use the CT mult and
bandmap windows
improve antennas on 10 and 20 meters this summer
73 - Tom K1KI
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E-mail: frenaye@pcnet.com
Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box 386, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444
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