ARRL June VHF Contest
Call: K2EZ/R
Operator(s): K2EZ N2RJ
Station: K2EZ/R
Class: Limited Rover LP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs):
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 227 58
2: 115 22
222: 70 13
432: 75 15
903:
1.2:
2.3:
3.4:
5.7:
10G:
24G:
-------------------
Total: 487 120 Total Score = 75,840
Club:
Comments:
Ria N2RJ joined me for this rove and it was my first time out with a partner.
It was also the first time out after major antenna and equipment upgrades of
which only some saw use during the sprints. Recognizing that FT8 is a reality
part of those upgrades included FT8 (and MSK144) capability for 6m and 2m.
Our setup had 1.25m and 70cm in the front while 6m and 2m could be selectively
directed to rigs in the front or to the Flex radio in the back. All the digital
modes were operated using the Flex.
Ria ran 6 meters most of the time and while she spent some time on FT8, she went
to SSB and CW as those tended to be more manageable while roving. When 6m was
hopping 2m went to me in the front, but when things got slow Ria sometimes
picked up 2m in addition to 6m.
FT8 worked well when single callers replied to our CQ. However when multiple
callers replied it became problematic due to the fact that the compound callsign
(K2EZ/R) doesn't sequence well so the software is doing a bit of guessing. This
was not an unexpected problem but was a constant nuisance.
It remains to be seen how the FT8 contacts stand up in log checking. The /R is
not on every sequence of the exchange. If that doesn’t create enough risk of
someone mis-logging the rover without the /R, the basic contest mode exchange
the rover never once transmits the other station’s call when someone answers
the rover’s CQ. One can manually work around this by manually forcing a
redundant message that has both calls (but no /R on the rover). Such manual
intervention can cause its own confusion.
Activity was typical for what I seen when 6m openings are good. That is to say
activity on the higher bands tends to dry up. Between that, the trend towards
coordinating in venues like KST, and now FT8, there was very few stations to be
found on 2m and up calling CQ on SSB or CW.
On FT8 we made 39 Qs. Most of those were within our own grid or an adjacent
one. Perhaps the best benefit of FT8 was dredging a few E-skip type distant
multipliers while 6m was not reliably open. Most of those distant grids ended
up being ones we got anyway when the band was more open. Still there were a few
6m tropo grids FT8 managed to pull in that we didn’t get on SSB and ones I
usually haven’t worked. We don’t know how workable those stations would
have been on SSB. The biggest down side is that a few of the FT8 stations were
ones I knew had four bands and had we contacted on SSB we would have worked thru
the bands but because we worked FT8 we didn’t have the opportunity.
We did note that many of the stations we did work on FT8 were stations I
hadn’t worked previously so it seems FT8 is bringing some new 6m activity.
While the 39 Qs seems small, it is still represents about 8% of our QSO count so
nothing to sneeze at.
We only completed 12 of a planned 13 grids. In part this was due to my having
planned a schedule for once and then getting confused thinking we had more time
in some spots when we already had over-stayed the allocated time. Then we were
sidelined a bit to resolve a high SWR in our 1.25m yagi. I would like to get a
copy of that picture some stranger took while I was standing on top of the rover
checking the antenna.
The new equipment worked well but we had a few issues. Most troublesome was too
much 2m RF coupling into the 6m antenna whenever the yagi was pointed in the
rough direction of the 6m antenna. The Flex would throw errors from too much
induced RF. So we had to work around about 90 degrees of arc we couldn’t
point the antenna. Sunday afternoon we lost the 12V to 24V boost converter for
our rotator. With 24V lost the rotation speed dropped to a crawl.
Despite the issues, the performance improvements overcame any deficiencies.
With the help of Ria, we were able to pull out a score a bit better than last
year.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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