ARRL DX Contest, SSB
Call: KU2M
Operator(s): KU2M
Station: KU2M
Class: SOSB/15 HP
QTH: Wayne, NJ
Operating Time (hrs): 25
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160:
80:
40:
20:
15: 1652 113
10:
-------------------
Total: 1652 113 Total Score = 560,028
Club:
Comments:
It was the best of contests, it was the worst of contests.
Friday night, all began on a good note. Conditions were good, and there seemed
to be plenty of activity. Had a good evening until the band died.
First thing Saturday morning I began noticing that signal strengths were
cutting in and out by 20 or 30 dB. After making sure that I hadn't done
anything more stupid than I usually do in the shack itself, I QRTed and went
outside into the frozen wasteland of the backyard to investigate.
What I found had overtones of the apocalyptic. Water had been dripping off the
roof by day, collecting on the concrete apron, and then freezing solid in the
single digit (Fahrenheit) temperatures by night. This had apparently been going
on for some time, and a great area of my backyard was now the KU2M Glacier.
Furthermore, for whatever reasons, the glacier was on the move, and had been
silently pulling all my feedlines with it. The coax links at both ends of the
main feedline were now pulled tight, stressing the connectors and probably
causing the intermittency I was hearing. Gee, I just knew I should have made
them longer. Let me disconnect them and adjust the slack a bit.
Problem: I had to disconnect the coax, but the hardline at the house breakout
box had apparently fallen flat on the concrete apron and the connectors were
now submerged beneath a 3- or 4-inch-thick layer of solid, rock-hard ice.
Acutely aware that Saturday morning during a major DX contest was not the time
to be doing this, I nonetheless grabbed a pickaxe out of the garage and began
frantically chopping through the ice to free up the connectors. 10 minutes of
Ice Station Zebra activity later, I had the connector exposed, managed to
unscrew it with the aid of a large pair of Vise Grips and replaced it with
another section of coax. I also replaced the stressed coax link at the
opposite, tower end, then hurried back to the shack to check the SWR. It was
higher than usual, but was working and acceptable. Stations seemed to be able
to hear me OK, though, and I decided that this would have to do, since I had
already given up enough valuable prime time. Saturday morning on 15M you don't
want to be digging through a glacier in your backyard.
About an hour later, the noise level on 15 suddenly and inexplicably jumped.
The noise abruptly rose to a steady S7 and sounded like bacon frying through a
large Woodstock-style PA system. Worse, the noise was coming directly from the
direction of Europe. Needless to say, this made copy of weaker stations very
difficult, and the coat-hanger-antenna stations not copiable at all, despite
all noise blankers and other receiving gizmos and tricks. It was the worst
noise I had ever heard on a contest morning, and also made it impossible to
hear relatively weak, adjacent USA stations. I found a frequency, and after
about 15 or 20 minutes of running, I got yelled at by somebody apparently very
mad at me for creating QRM for him, even though I had asked two or three times
if the frequency was in use before starting, and had been on there for at least
20 minutes without hearing anybody complain. Geez, I'm sorry. I didn't do it ON
PURPOSE. Oh yes, and next time, ask nicely and please identify yourself in
accordance with FCC regulations.
After continuing to suffer with the noise until well into the afternoon, it
suddenly disappeared just in time (of course) for the end of propagation to
Europe. Was that it? Could I now concentrate on the contest? Nope. A few
minutes later, the XYL came into the shack to tell me that there was a
gentleman from the local cable television company at the front door who wanted
to talk to me. You're kidding, right, Honey? I asked. Apparently she was not
kidding, so I got out of the chair and went downstairs.
There, pacing around in my driveway, was a man dressed in work boots and cable
repair garb. Oh geez, now what? I opened the door. "Can I help you?"
I asked. He turned to me. With a very serious demeanor, he said, "Yes. By
any chance, are you broadcasting on 22 Mhz?"
Oh crap. The Cable Police were here to arrest me - I glanced out at the road in
front of the house to look for SWAT vans. Not seeing any, I said, "Well,
uh, not exactly 22 Mhz. Why do you want to know?" He explained that the
people in a development to the northeast had had problems that morning with
their cable TV reception, and it turns out, he continued, the problem had been
caused by a high voltage insulator on a power line pole that had broken and was
arcing - badly. The man loosened up a bit at the thought of it. "Never saw
anything like it - that sucker was sparking so bright, you could see it lit up
in broad daylight!" "Wow!" I enjoined, "How about
that!" Well, that explained the frying pan noise to Europe, but I was only
interested in one thing: "Did they fix it?" I asked. "Yes,"
he said. "They fixed it." Thank Bog. "But you know," he
continued, "I was checking for noise with my analyzer, and I kept seeing
all this RF around 22 Mhz, and I'm wondering, 'where the heck is this RF coming
from?' - and then I spotted your tower and antennas, and thought maybe it was
coming from here."
I gulped. Trying to sound as impressive as possible, I admitted that I had been
transmitting, not broadcasting, on 21 Mhz. Not 22 Mhz. "There's an
international amateur radio competition this weekend," I explained. I even
threw in the letters ARRL and the FCC, as well as the word "legal" -
but at that moment, I would have thrown scrambled eggs at him if I thought it
would have impressed him. But he was barely more than bored, but nodded and
explained that their cable modems all worked on (of course) 22 Mhz, and it was
possible that RF near this frequency could create "problems." Yeah...
NATURALLY they would have to design THEIR cable modems to work on 22 Mhz,
because 15 meters is my favorite contesting band! The minutes ticked by, but no
handcuffs or SWAT team materialized, probably because there was no official
"complaint" of interference to the Shopping Channel or reruns of
"Housewives of New Jersey." So, after listening to a little more
polite banter from me about the sanctity of amateur radio communications that
he couldn't have been less interested in, he finally said "Well, good
afternoon," and turned and walked away down the driveway back to his cable
truck. "Bye-bye," I waved, my smile still frozen in place. I then
quickly shut the door, made sure it was locked securely and ran as fast as I
could back to the shack, just in time for the evening opening to Japan and the
Far East.
Conditions to eastern Asia were very good, and I was working more mults from
that part of the world than I ever had before… and I wasn't even cheating.
Multiple HLs, BYs, HSs, YBs, a DU, BV, and even a 3W were all in the house!
Holy propagation, Batman! This was more like it. It was the best smorgasbord of
mults this boy from W2 land had ever worked.
When the sun rose on Dupeday (some people call it "Sunday") the next
morning, I was psyched. I was ready to make up for the losses of the previous
morning, but when I turned up the receiver audio, the band sounded quiet… too
quiet. I had checked propagation and saw that the A index was an alarmingly high
20, but this was different. I hit the mike switch briefly, and suddenly the band
jumped to life, stayed that way for a few seconds, then died. The dreaded
intermittent was back, and it was worse than it had been the day before! Also,
SWR had risen overnight to over 2:1 no matter what antenna I selected, and the
amplifier was not happy about it. There was no question. It was the feedline.
Again. I had to fix it.
I frantically went through my dwindling assortment of odd coax sections, taking
them outside to replace the coax links, over and over again. If they were up, my
neighbors, I'm sure, were most certainly wondering what the "ham nut"
next door was doing out in the sub-freezing cold at 7 o'clock in the morning on
a Sunday, the first day of Daylight Savings Time, no less, when he should be
sleeping in like a normal person, but I wasn't worried about that, and I
certainly wasn't normal. What I was worried about was that I was burning
daylight to Europe and unless I came up with something fast, that would be it
for the contest. As I feverishly swapped out coax sections, none of which made
any difference, I kept wondering how everything in a station can work
flawlessly for weeks before a contest and then suddenly break the morning of. I
tried switching out the coax links inside the shack between the radio and the
amplifier, too, just in case the problem was in one of those sections. It
wasn't; there was no change. The fault was outside, not inside, and nothing was
helping. I needed a Hail Mary pass, and quickly. In a flash, I realized the only
thing to do was to bypass the entire length of hardline - coax links and all -
with something else, and eliminate in one fell swoop whatever was causing the
problem at whatever junction of the feedline it may be occurring. But with
what? I had run out of options. Digging deeper, I came to the very bottom of my
garage coax junk pile, and my last chance: a 30 year-old roll of incredibly
filthy RG-8X mini coax with one side chopped off and a really badly installed
and horribly beat-up PL-259 plug on the other end. Man, it was ugly. Any sane
person would have thrown this awful thing out years ago, but then again, I
wasn't sane. I could thank my motto, "Never throw anything away!"
which had once again come through for me. I dimly remembered that the roll had
been purchased at a Radio Shack back in the good old days when you could buy
70' rolls of bright, shiny 14 gauge stranded antenna wire there for 3 or 4
bucks, but this wasn't the time for nostalgia, and I wasn't out of the woods
yet. Time, QSOs and mults were inexorably slipping away, and who knew what
condition the cable was in? I slit the insulation off the chopped end to check
for oxidation. Miraculously, the shield was still copper-colored! I stripped
the insulation back further and extracted the center conductor. Clean! I then
screwed the plug end into my ancient Heathkit Cantenna dummy load and stuffed
the bare wire of the other end into the SO-239 of my MFJ-259 antenna analyzer,
and turned it on. Even more miraculously, it measured OK. I ran outside with
the roll, slipping and sliding on the snowblowed path of treacherous, solid ice
that led to the tower, and screwed the plug end into the StackMatch. I then
started back down through a section of woods between the tower and the house,
unrolling the coax, and tried not to fall over as I trudged through the woods,
up to my knees in snow. When I finally reached the breakout box, I stuffed the
bare wire ends into the SO-239 connector installed there, wrapped the coax
shield around the barrel threads, and wrapped electrical tape around the whole
affair. It was sleazy, but it would have to do, because there just wasn't any
time to solder a new connector on. I mumbled a few words of encouragement at it
and rushed back into the house.
After picking all the snow out of my boots and running up to the shack for what
had to be the tenth time that morning, I braced myself and checked the SWR with
the transceiver: 1:1! Hallelujah! It was working!
I turned the amp back on, but now there was a new problem - although the SWR
at the transceiver indicated 1:1, the SWR meter on the amp itself was showing
infinity! Consequently, the amp, being microprocessor-controlled, would not
work! What had happened? I hadn't owned the amp very long, and wasn't used to
it. Had I blown something in it? I shut it off and back on, hoping it needed to
reset. No change. The amp was useless, so I shut it down and ran barefoot for an
hour. Yes, people could still hear me, but it wasn't the same, and if some rare
mult showed up and caused a huge pileup, I'd be cooked. Plus, I had already
done half the contest in HP class. Then I spied my previous amp, still sitting
on the floor, but minus its power plug, and thought, "why not." As I
tried to keep up some kind of run, I unplugged my new amplifier from the wall
socket, removed the power plug from its power cord and transferred it back on
my old amp. Better than nothing. I lifted the old amp up on top of the main
amp, and looked behind the amps to switch out all the coax connections, relay
control lines, etc., when…
As I peered over the top of the amp into the nexus of wires below, a great
feeling of shame came over me. Earlier in the morning, in all the confusion
trying to find the problem with the feedline, I had switched out cables leading
from the exciter to the amplifier. I shuddered. Could it be? Had I put them back
in backwards? No… I couldn't have done anything that boneheaded, could I?
Well, yes, Peter, that's exactly what you did. Face it! That would explain the
>10:1 reading through the amp's SWR meter, but 1:1 at the rig's meter. The
power was running backward through the amp's SWR bridge, so it measured as
infinite!
OK, I'm an idiot, but what about the amp? Could it be that I didn't blow
anything and the amp was OK? I took the plug off the standby amp's power cord
and put it back on the main amp's power cord, plugged the amp in and turned it
on. After it warmed up, my theory proved correct: yes, I was a complete idiot.
I had grabbed the wrong coax ends and had connected the amplifier BACKWARDS! I
was ready for the chicken farm. This was embarrassing, and I realized I better
not ever tell anyone about it, especially any other hams. Yes, and I also
resolved to send back my ham license - but after the contest was over.
So now, the only thing left to worry about was if the mini-coax would handle a
KW at 21 Mhz. Would it?
It did. I was back on the air, but through a combination of bad luck,
primordial ice, the Cable Police and stupid mistakes I had lost or at least
impaired 2 to 4 hours of prime running time. My hopes of doing as well as I had
hoped were gone, and I asked myself if there was any point in continuing - after
all, I had lost the year before by the thinnest of margins - and perhaps doing
the rest of the contest, even if there was no hope of winning, would mean
questioning my sanity. I quickly remembered that I had no sanity, so I didn't
have to worry about that, but then again, maybe I should be at least a little
worried about myself from a more basic point of view. After all, what WAS this
ham nut doing, running around like a lunatic on the morning of the first day of
Daylight Savings Time, when he should be fast asleep in bed like the rest of
America, after a really bad first day?
Well, perhaps Steve McQueen's character in the classic film "The Thomas
Crowne Affair" said it best. During a friendly game of golf, he gets stuck
in a sand trap, and it looks like his game is lost. But instead of quitting, he
bets his golf partner $2000 that he can do the near-hopeless shot - twice - and
salvage his golf game. But he fails to sink the putt, and loses the bet. His
golfing partner thinks he's crazy, and yells at him. "You're mad!" he
practically screams at McQueen, "Absolutely mad!"
McQueen's character simply smiles back calmly and offers the perfect response:
"What else can we do on Sunday?"
And that's how I feel about it, although I call it Dupeday.
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