I realized I never wrote up anything about my experiences in the January VHF
Sweepstakes. In light of the recent Rover "lunchbox" debate, I thought it
might be entertaining to see what one person experienced in the contest.
To start off, I think I have convinced most people that I am stark, staring
mad. At least my non-ham friends now believe this! I think a lot of ham
friends now do, too.
The night before the contest I set up the 9-band station (144 thru 10368
MHz) in my car on shelves I built to set on the driver's seat. Station is
completely homebrew by me including all antennas except for the IF rigs (two
HTX-100's). One of them has been extensively modified to be a 144 MHz IF for
the microwave gear. I drove to the hill in EN50rl I have been using for QRP
Portable operation for a couple years and started to set up at about 2 PM
CST (an hour after the contest had started). The temperature was 20 degrees
and the wind was gusting up to 50 mph with blowing snow mixed in. I hadn't
expected the wind or snow. It normally takes me an hour to get all the
antennas set up but this time it took 2 1/2 hours. There are some things I
just can't do with gloves on (like tiny screws and SMA connectors) and my
fingers kept freezing, making frequent trips back into the car necessary to
thaw them out. I think the wind chill factor was minus 20 degrees F.
Once I get everything set up, I had great difficulty getting anyone's
attention with my 10 watts. Everyone except Bob K2DRH seemed to be ignoring
my direction. My own antennas use Armstrong rotors and getting out to rotate
the antennas was painful every time, with the 50 mph winds and the snow. I
made a number of QSO's by about 9 pm but nowhere near what I had expected.
The antennas were very difficult to keep under control and the antenna masts
were thrashing around vertically as well as horizontally. I almost lost them
several times. I did have the tripod with my dish for 2304-and-up blow over
and it bent the dish. Fortunately it didn't damage the feed. I just took
that part of the setup down for attempted repair later.
I decided Saturday night at about 9:30 pm to head into Gibson City, IL,
about 10 miles east of where I was, to rent a motel room for the night. I
secured the antennas the best I could and hoped they would stay up
overnight. At the motel, I managed to bend the dish back into something
pretty close to straight. I also recharged my battery. Seems they run down
faster when the temperature is around freezing!
I got up the next morning at about 7 AM and made my way back to the hill. I
think the temperature was about 15 degrees then and the wind was still bad,
but not quite as bad. Maybe gusting to 35 mph. Being outside in it was still
painful. The antennas had survived the night and I got everything set up
again.
I managed to make some more QSO's on Sunday but it was rough. There were
times when I sat for almost two hours without a QSO. My average number of
QSO's was about 2 1/2 per hour when I figured it out later. I managed to
make one QSO on 2304 and one on 3456 on Sunday with K2DRH. The people I
usually work on 5760 and 10368 were nowhere to be found by me, so I didn't
get to work those bands at all this time. Band conditions to me were pretty
dismal for the entire time I participated in this contest; I have never seen
them worse than this.
At about 4 pm I decided I'd had enough and packed everything up and headed
home. It took as long to get the antennas down as it did to put them up.
A couple of notes I made to myself were: (1) Find some pens that write in
temperatures below freezing. The typical ballpoint just won't do that; and
(2) try to figure out how to keep the stakes that hold antenna mast guy
ropes from freezing into the ground in winter operations. I managed to get
them loose by putting on vise-grips and rotating while pulling till they
came out.
When it was done, I'd made 36 QSO's total and had 1850 points. It took a
couple days to recover from finger frostbite. I may or may not do this
again; if we'd had phenomenal conditions like we did in the August UHF
contest it would've been worth it. At least in June I don't have the same
weather to contend with! Just tornadoes.
73, Zack W9SZ
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