ARRL January VHF Sweepstakes
Call: K2DRH
Operator(s): K2DRH
Station: K2DRH
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: EN41vr IL
Operating Time (hrs): 15
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 66 34
2: 78 35
222: 32 20
432: 39 19
903: 7 6
1.2: 13 9
2.3: 3 3
3.4: 2 2
5.7:
10G:
24G:
-------------------
Total: 240 128 Total Score = 51,968
Club:
Comments:
Murphy is relentless. Apparently he caught wind of my â??Lance Armstrongâ??
aspirations to capture the SOLP VHF Sweepstakes top spot for a 7th year in a
row. With surgical precision he threw down problem after problem until he was
sure my station was not only down, but out. For a week or so before the
contest Iâ??d been noticing the rotor arcing noise on 6M coming back a little
and suspected a bit of oxidation on the rotor and brushes due to gearbox oil
seepage again, but running the motor a while cleared it right up so I wasnâ??t
worried about it. Mistake number one. Everything worked OK up until the
morning of the contest when my antennas suddenly stopped rotating. When I
climbed to 80 feet where the rotor is, there was nothing obviously wrong and it
all started working again just fine after I turned the motor shaft by hand a
little. I climbed down again thinking it was maybe that a bit more oil may
have seeped into the motor from the gearbox again, but I reasoned that the
combination of frigid weather and constant rotation would keep the brushes
clear. In retrospect it was a bit noisier and jerkier than usual, but I
didnâ??t notice that right away. Mistake number 2.
The contest started off pretty well with average January conditions. No real
enhancement but I was running about where I wanted to be until just after dark.
The rotor would hang occasionally and Iâ??d had to go up the tower twice more
to turn the motor shaft to get it to run again, so I was a bit frustrated with
it. The 432 preamp was crackling and refusing to switch back on again all the
time, but after a couple of difficult Qâ??s it cleared itself up (but nothing
fixes itself forever). At 0100Z it sounded like there was maybe a bit of Es to
5 land on 6M and I could hear a few of the multis calling CQ, but I was having
trouble working them and was wondering why. I went to move the antenna to work
an EN34 station but heard no change in signal level. A look outside confirmed
my worst fears. While the motor was running and the magnets on the motor shaft
spinner were making the reed switch indicate position changes, nothing was
actually moving on top. Up the tower again, this time prepared to deal with
the usual culprit, a slipped chain. But when I got there everything was
intact. The motor was running but the top gear on the gearbox was not turning.
I carefully pulled the motor down just enough to check if it had come uncoupled
from the shaft. However after seeing that the key was not broken, the motor
slipped down suddenly and the key went flying off into the snow. Mistake
number 3.
So I went back up the tower again with a new key, put it all back together and
still nothing. I took the side cover off the gearbox expecting thick oil to
ooze out, but got a handful of metallic shredded wheat instead. There was no
oil to speak of and the worm gears inside were totally destroyed. Iâ??d
assumed that a slight gearbox oil leak in the shaft seal to the motor wasnâ??t
serious enough to drain all the oil out very quickly. Mistake number 4. Oh
well, I still had the old gearbox that also had a motor shaft oil leak, but it
had plenty of oil and would work long enough to make my WSJT skeds starting at
0500Z and hopefully finish out the contest. The nighttime temperatures had
plummeted into single digits, but at least it wasnâ??t too breezy. So I
hauled up another 40# gearbox (this was much harder than it sounds, especially
in the dark with frozen fingers). Of course the chain sprocket I needed to
transfer to the new box was stuck on the shaft of the old one and I had to
bring it down to get it off. The work took lot longer than I originally
thought including a half hour to thaw out enough to get my fingers working
again and another hour to persuade the gear off without breaking it. By the
time I got it all installed back on the tower again it was closing in on
0630Z.
Iâ??d missed my skeds with K5QE, K3TUF and N3NGE but I could still recover with
N1DPM. Much to my surprise I heard nothing from him! I went to work K3EAR at
0700 and heard nothing from them either! Suddenly it dawned on my apparently
just thawing out brain that I must be pointed in the wrong direction. A quick
trip outside with a powerful flashlight confirmed I was 180 degrees out!
Mistake number 5. Good thing I hadnâ??t tried to rotate it much! I turned it
the right direction, recalibrated my display, worked them and all the rest of
my skeds just fine, later finding two out of the 4 stations Iâ??d missed skeds
with on randoms. I worked WSJT way too late and got way too little sleep
(barely 2 hours), especially since by now my muscles were screaming from
climbing the tower to 80â?? at least 7 times (in my haze I may have forgotten
about a few trips). Iâ??d already had a killer workout for a young man and at
55 Iâ??m not so young anymore! But I was determined to recover lost ground now
that things were lashed back together again. I could rest after the contest! I
was back in business! Or so I thought.
The morning was going OK and I put almost all of my morning skeds as well as a
lot of multipliers under my belt in my quest to make up for some of
Saturdayâ??s lost time. Unfortunately my luck didnâ??t hold. The motor
started hanging up again from the metal particle contaminated oil in it. It
needed to be cleaned out and rebuilt again, but that had to wait at least until
late afternoon when the Sunday doldrums hit. I had to make 4 or 5 more trips up
the tower before noon just to get things moving again. It had been snowing
since early morning but with the temperature rising to hover just around
freezing, slushy snow was making the tower rungs a little icier and more
dangerous each time. Around noon I made another trip but this time the motor
ran, then suddenly stopped after only a few turns. I reached over to flip it
again, but this time the lower portion of the shaft with the magnet spinner bar
on it went flying off into the snow.
By now I was so tired that I hadnâ??t recognized that ice was building up on
the spinner bar and the magnetic reed switch. Mistake number 6. The coating
caused the spinner bar to hit the switch repeatedly and both eventually came
loose. The spinner was now lost in 6 inches of snow. Amazingly after thawing
out with a bowl of soup I went back outside and found it! So I went back up
again and reinstalled it with the high hopes that the switch was still intact.
It wasnâ??t, and I had no spare. Mistake number 7. Iâ??d run out of options
and there was no way to get the antennas to move except by defeating the
position indication logic in the rotor box and turning it blind.
Iâ??d like to say that sanity finally got the better of me after at least 13
trips up the tower. Or logic prevailed when I realized I would have to either
rebuild the motor or keep on climbing and kicking it loose even though the
tower rungs now had so much ice on them a sane man would be afraid to climb
anymore. Or that that the risk of destroying my rotor loops if I turned too
far rationally overcame my desire to continue against irrational odds. However
there was nothing rational about my decision to end the contest early. The
thought that it was only a hobby never crossed my mind (and N2KMA knew better
than to say it until MUCH later). I sat there and worked all the stations that
I could hear with the antennas pointed south, jogging the antennas a few seconds
at a time. I was going to eyeball directions and just work whatever I could
hear until I had to move it again (that is, if it would move). I was getting
punchy from sheer muscle fatigue (my left knee is still swollen over a week
later) when my operating chair broke right out from under me! That was the
last straw! I finally threw in the towel, letting my body crash into the sleep
deprived oblivion it deserved. 50K for maybe 15 hours actually in the seat, a
far cry from the 150K this contest could have been. There will be other
contests. But nobody can say I didnâ??t try.
73 de Bob
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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