ARRL June VHF Contest
Call: K2DRH
Operator(s): K2DRH
Station: K2DRH
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: EN41vr IL
Operating Time (hrs):
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 716 161
2: 71 35
222: 33 21
432: 46 22
903: 17 10
1.2: 24 13
2.3: 6 6
3.4: 6 5
5.7:
10G:
24G:
-------------------
Total: 919 273 Total Score = 304,668
Club: Society of Midwest Contesters
Comments:
Again I put a long description of what it took to get on for this test at the
end. It ain’t easy to keep all this stuff running! My heart goes out to Jeff
K1TEO a true contest champion who lost one tower to a weather event and it took
all the antennas off his other tower when it went down. Jeff is a real trouper
who put up a temporary 6M beam just to get on and give out points! It
wouldn’t be the same if he wasn’t in my log.
The contest started out pretty good. No Es but guys were there to work on 2M
and 6M SSB for the first hour or so. After an hour that all changed as 6M was
quiet on the analog side and everyone seemed to retreat to digital FT8. 2M was
wasteland no signals on the scope, no answers to CQs. 6M FT8 was hopping with
all the locals I normally work on 2M too and the new freq of 144.174 we have
been using for FT8 with great results up to 500 miles in the mornings was all
but abandoned. It was tedious and disheartening to have to look for locals on
6M, try to remember if they had 2M, work them on FT8 over a minute or so when we
could have worked in few seconds on SSB, then pry them loose with 4 or 5
repeated free messages of “W3xxx 144.xxx?”, until they realized they had to
reply (God forbid anyone ELSE who was monitoring would ALSO think to QSY there
for some action), wait for that reply (sometime all I got was “NO”) and
finally work them there. The free message of 13 characters is WAY limited to
try and direct a QSY request. If you include their call it helps but there is
no room for yours. Call plus QSY 2M gets you back “WHERE?” or “QRG?”
instead of just assuming the call freq (what a concept .. a CALL freq!).
I’m astounded I didn’t see more locals trying to get each other to QSY to
make better scores. You can type in a call and 144.2xx or 144.1x if it’s a
2x3 call and eventually get a response and maybe a QSY but until it catches on
it takes a while. I’m also amazed that locals I can see with +05 or better
signals (quite audible and moving the S meter) on FT8 seem to have trouble
hearing/decoding me and it can take a minute or three to even get to the QSY
part! Guess all that aluminum gain causes multipath and maybe some other stuff
that disrupts FT8 on the strong ones. I’m flabbergasted that many just kept
right on CQing on FT8 right through 20 over band openings when the “channel”
was totally choked and their receivers couldn’t handle it. While the band was
really open there was a literal sea of green of unanswered CQs while my
instantaneous ratemeter was hitting 200 plus!
All day long Saturday there was very little Es (a few short bubbles) and nobody
on 2M not even in the evening like normal. Some of the stations I work on 4
bands didn’t even bother to set them up (I didn’t have enough computer
screens), QSYed to 2M only with a vague promise of “later’ which almost
always means never. Unless you were a serious multiband station or rover there
were few band runs and like January my 2M and above QSOs are WAY down because of
this. This is a multiband VHF contest, not a 6M digital love fest! And of
course there were the stations that refused to go into contest mode and failed
open when they got “funny grids”. I realize now that some are using knockoff
WSJT programs made for HF that don’t even HAVE contest mode (made in Europe,
so why bother).
2M and above was pretty flat due to all the rain. Many of the local rovers were
washed out by the rain Saturday and Sunday and couldn’t get set up or had to
tear down suddenly. Some just had to abort. The wet and foggy conditions
severely inhibited UHF and above contacts for the whole weekend. One station 90
miles away I normally work on 1296 SSB I couldn’t hear at all even on cw.
Saturday evening the static crashed from lighting kept building. Around the
time MSK144 got effective for meteor scatter and things were picking up was when
the thunderstorms came back with a vengeance. I had to disconnect in the middle
of a sked with W45UHF on 2M since the noise went to S9 and the lightning was
almost overhead. The storm was so big it lased us with a deluge from midnight
to 5 AM so at least I got some sleep. I ended the day barely over 150 Qs in the
log.
Sunday morning was still really noisy as the thunderstorms went slowly east and
crapped out prop that way. It was tough to decode the pings through the crashes
but MSK was effective and I worked several on the PJ page. But my morning sked
with a rare grid was a bust and my usual sked with K0AWU failed at 432 due to
the WX. Nobody on 2M SSB except the multis CQing to no replies. I CQd on 6M
msk144 but didn’t get a lot of random replies. Too many on FT8 already! I
kept sniping at FT8 for mults and trying to get a QSY or three. It was pretty
grim going until around 1400Z when I get a trickle of SSB Es to FL and to TX.
That waxed and waned until 1730 or so when the rate picked up and I stated to
get some Atlantic FM grids in there too. I have multiple antennas, one fixed on
FL, another on TX and was able to bring the low bay of the array (the only one
working) on the FM grids to good advantage.
At 1800 all hell broke loose and it opened to the FN grids in the NE and I got
the 2x11s that way and started a feeding frenzy of 150 Qs that hour! It has not
opened so strong to the NE like that here in a very long time during a June
contest, 10 years or so! It ebbed a little during the 1900 hour and I was able
to work several multiband stations and rovers on multiple bands and still put
over 50 6M Qs in the log. But the next two hours were also 125 plus hours. It
was thinning out by 2200Z when I had to tear myself away again to work the
rovers that did make it out. You really can’t win this contest on 6M alone, at
least not against a station that can put a decent effort on 2m and above.
It got really short at one point and I’m sure there had to be some 2M Es
somewhere. 6M stayed open but not as strong for the next hour or two but there
was little for me to work that I hadn’t already. I didn’t get any double
hop at all to the west coast and there weren’t a lot of Es Qs to the NW, SW or
even normal hot spots like Colorado.
Finally by evening stations realized that there was life on 2M SSB and a lot of
mults went in the log with band runs and such. Conditions were still way down
but it was more like normal and it was actually hard to work it sometimes
getting multiple callers in different directions to run the bands all at once.
They really waited too late for that, should have been doing it the day before
when 6 was dead! The last hour my cell phone and computer screen was going
crazy with 2M and above band requests! Where were they all day and evening on
Saturday??!!
I ended u with a really good score, but it could have been a great score had I
worked all the stations on 2M that I normally can! Let’s just hope that this
sudden surge on 6M FT8 is just a fad and folks get wise to the true potential of
FT8 to ADD mults and such to the score like MSK144 has, rather than just hanging
there all day long to try and make the bulk of their Qs. Please be more
flexible instead of making it impossible to pry your face from the computer
screen to work a little analog radio that is much more contest score efficient!
This new mode is a TOOL, not a be all and end all! Maybe more will get hip to
the potential of finding more QSOs on 2M when they see a local like me say QSY
to 2M on FT8! And maybe let’s hope that FT8 takes off on 2M too since it
holds a lot of promise for some pretty long QSOs.
*****
This spring was really crazy with family health issues that resulted in us
spending almost 6 weeks taking care of close relatives in North Carolina but
which resolved themselves nicely in the end. It was really cold here up until
mid-May when the weather suddenly turned from winter to summer with record
setting 80 and 90 degree days that made outdoor work miserable to perform the
usual spring yard chores and clean up the many dead tree blowdowns. The grass
went prompt critical and required mowing twice a week! I cut it before Dayton
Hamvention and it was already going to seed by the time I got home! So I
didn’t even get to the usual spring maintenance stuff on the towers (never
mind the broken stuff) until Memorial Day weekend when it was insufferably hot
and humid.
The 6M pair of 11els had high SWR that was traced to a bad N Tee on the power
divider where the center fingers on the main coax side were sprung and had it
had been arcing internally. The 3456 problem I thought was a relay was really a
bad amplifier stage in the tower mounted preamp so after troubleshooting I had
to take it down and just put a straight coax between the relays until I can get
it fixed. It actually hears better then I expected with all the coax loss. It
was then that we discovered the Lithium Ion batteries on one of our 440 FM com
radios (25 year old Alinco credit card sized low power DJ-C4 HTs) is going bad,
luckily on the ground radio where we use a separate monitor radio so N2KMA does
not have to have hers with her all the time. Found a replacement but it has to
come from China and won’t be here for a few weeks. It will still take some
charge and will work in the charger so we made do.
The 2304 Superflex had aspirated water between the jacket and shield spiral and
shed water into the connector to the LMR600 rotor jumper. I’m done with using
FSJ4 ½ in Superflex on the tower, it’s easier to work with and cheaper than
LMR600, but it gives you nothing but grief due to the poor bonding on the outer
jacket to copper spiral causing it to aspirate humid air from any jacket
imperfection and sublimate out water that rolls right down into the sealed
connectors. I’ve been gradually replacing it.
The squirrels (rats with bushy tails) also had their way with my 160M wire
antenna with the apex at 140 feet on the 160 foot 8x7 6M array tower, chewing
the rope and causing it to tangle all up in the array elements in the strong
spring winds before I noticed and rotated the tower. That bent several elements
as well as breaking one off. Of course the 6M7 antennas are obsolete now and a
new element is a special order. Untangling and straightening was several hours
in the hot sun and even 2 bottles of water (one frozen) weren’t enough to keep
me from getting dehydrated and having difficulty climbing down. Usually it gets
cooler and less humid up above 50 feet or so but the hot humid layer seemed to
be much higher and denser than usual when I was doing all my tower work and I
really suffered from it; one day it was even up to 100 feet.
Thursday and Friday nights before the contest the thunderstorms were huge with
torrential rain making it difficult sleeping. Sometime between Friday morning
and evening the SWR on the 8x7 6M array went sky high on any antenna combination
and it sounded dead compared to the other antennas. The controller was putting
the right voltages to the right relay outputs but when it was connected to the
tower box the readings were way off. With reluctance I climbed the tower
Saturday morning before the contest to about 70 feet where the relay antenna
combiner and matching box is and had N2KMA switch the controller but none of the
relays were pulling in at all (it grounds the antennas by design). Rather than
take any time out of the contest to troubleshoot it I hard wired the bottom pair
as the most useful for Es, and the quietest pair in a thunderstorm as these were
predicted all weekend. It proved to be a good decision!
I’m still struggling with N1MM+ and the Flex 6700 since I use the second VFO
for a 2M and above slice/panadapter and can’t automate two radios with
multiple transverters to the second VFO. It won’t accept any manual freq input
if I attempt to automate the second VF0 with the 2M transverter slice (it
rejects anything but a 2M freq). So I have to disconnect it from the CAT COM
port on VFO2 and that leaves me with no voice or CW keyer on 2M and above. Good
thing I’m used to doing CW by hand on the UHF and microwaves anyway. Weirdly
with No CAT set to VFO B in SO2R it will still switch between the two slices’
audio on the Flex when you change windows and a Control left or right arrow (or
pause key) will also switch the TX (just moving windows or selecting the band on
the band map will move the RX but not the TX).
But sometimes, seemingly at random, when I move to B VFO and start typing it
immediately switches me back to the A VFO and no matter what I do it will not
allow me to type a call in the B VFO without doing that switch over. I can’t
make it work again until I close and restart N1MM+. Since B VFO is where I log
all my contacts above 6M manually this is a real PITA! I can’t figure why it
does this, or how to correct it and nobody seems to know. Sometimes I also find
myself in RIT when I didn’t set the RIT. N1MM+ also got rid of the Buckmaster
lookup in the main window so now you don’t have it pop up with exact heading
info to the 6 digit grid, very useful with tight antennas especially on the
microwaves where the antenna beam width is only a few degrees. Also there is no
way to look up headings to a rover 6 digit grid. So I have to have Buckmaster
running in a separate window as well as a bearing and distance program for
rovers.
It all seemed a lot easier when I just had regular dumb radio, a few switches
and a basic logger. To run the bands it was easy to switch transverters, change
logger bands with a keyboard click (and still keep the call in the entry box),
change VFOs on the radio, adjust the big knob and be on frequency in few
seconds. Now logging and changing bands requires multiple mouse clicks on
difficult to see targets and/or keyboard key combinations on different computers
along with several other switch and mouse manipulations to get on frequency.
Anymore I find myself doing more computer stuff than radio stuff!
73 de Bob2 K2DRH
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