CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB - 2019
Call: P40T
Operator(s): VE3DZ
Station: P40T
Class: SOAB HP
Class Overlay: Classic
QTH: Aruba
Operating Time (hrs): 43.5
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 26 9 19
80: 505 21 77
40: 1579 27 107
20: 1644 26 106
15: 2152 26 104
10: 227 19 42
------------------------------
Total: 6133 128 455 Total Score = 10,471,846
Club: Contest Club Ontario
Comments:
I came 4 days earlier with pretty high expectations about the Contest. According
to the report I received from the station owner all equipment and all antennas
supposed to be working – last serious contest effort was in May and only one
renting between then and now. It probably played bad for me because I felt
relaxed and didn't really start setting up a station until the second day after
my arrival.
First I found out that 80 m dipole was resonating at 3.38 MHz (!?) and 160 m
antenna – at around 1.2 MHz. When I took closer look I found that one leg of
160 m dipole broke at about 40 feet above the ground level and was hanging
around the tower, the other piece was somewhere in the jungles.
Fixing 80 m antenna was pretty easy and painful – two 5-feet pieces of wire
were attached to each leg, so I simply removed them and after few
trial-and-error efforts and with the help of RigExpert AA-54 Antenna Analyzer
the resonance was brought to around 3750 kHz.
Fixing 160 m antenna appeared to be not an easy task. After I located the other
piece I climbed the tower and spliced two pieces together using NASA knot. The
wire was so rotten that I had to cut at least 2-3 inches from each side. After
everything was done, it was already almost evening time when I was in the bushes
and giant cactus area again tightening the guy wire. Just when I almost
finished, the wire broke again under the tension, but in a different spot.
I decided to leave it until Thursday morning and started to set up my SO2R
station. And then I discovered another 2 major problems: audio from K3 (my 2nd
radio) was terribly distorted while using MicroHAM micro keyer II in combination
with DX Doubler SO2R Interface.
Another problem – the 2nd Skyhawk tribander was developing high SWR
(infinity) on all bands – it seemed that either a cable developed “open”or
the antenna was disconnected from the balun.
No matter what I tried with Elecraft – the audio remained terrible.
I decided to put setting up a station on hold and climb the 2nd tower in the
morning to inspect the coax to the beam because without it wouldn't make sense
to have SO2R... Climbing the tower on Thursday morning didn't really help-
everything looked O.K. So mentally I kind got prepared to use SO1R in be in
Classic category, same as last year.
Returned to repair 160 m antenna. Climbed another tower and besides broken wire,
I found out that the antenna lost a jumper which connected the coax from the RF
choke with the antenna leg. And the remaining part was so rotten that it would
crumble to dust after you simply touch it....
I didn't feel like bringing the whole system down and re-do the thing (it
obviously needed soldering), so I went down and prepared few jumpers and clamps,
and then climbed the tower again and spliced everything I could by simply
twisting the leads. :-) After I taped everything and later returned to the
shack and measured SWR, the antenna was showing perfect resonance around 1850.
The next step would be checking the RX antennas. Of course, none of the 2
existing beverages were working. The sun started to go down when I was working
through the cactus field and bushes checking the wire line. Both of them seemed
to be Okay, but the boxes at the end were missing. I returned to the house and
started to look for resistor boxes. Finally found one box in the storage. But it
was already dark to get back and put it on.
So, here I was sitting on Thursday night thinking of how nice would it be to
have a crew of “station managers” coming ahead of time to prepare a station
for you... or at least to have a station host on the spot.
I never mentioned that all this time I didn't really have a chance to operate in
the air – but on those rare occasions when I was, I heard constant power line
noise. I tried not to concentrate on that knowing that in general this is a
noisy QTH, and sometimes noises come and go, but this time string power line
noise stayed all the time.
Friday morning brought me a pleasant surprise when John W2GD/P40W showed up. He
climbed the tower and with his professional eagle eye quickly found a crack in
the aluminum strap which connects balun with antenna element. How could I not
see it myself? Anyway, a simple wire jumper quickly fixed the problem nd with
less than 8 hours to go I was with 2 beams again. Theoretically I could switch
to SO2R again by replacing the K3 with the spare FT1000, but in that case I
would have to modify existing FT2000 MicroHAM cable, and then re-arrange
everything, but I was so tired and mentally was already prepared to enter
Classic category. Installed the box for the beverage and went to the beach.
Started contest on 40 m with pretty good run, however the noise was so awful,
that I had to find a direction to point the beam so I would more or less
minimize it. It seemed to be right in between the EU and U.S. Other bands were
affected too. Throughout the contest I found at least 3 different types of
noises coming from different directions: S9 power line noise (worst on 40 m)
coming from EU direction, few types of man-made noise (from different
directions) that would come and go, and digitsl type (router?) noise with
birdies, worst on 15 meters. The strategy during the contest was to stay on the
band which was less affected by the noise with the beams in the directions where
the noise was minimal. The receiving antennas didn't work at all, seemed like
the problem is somewhere in the coax (half buried) because all the boxes and
connections looked fine.
The 160 m antenna while working perfectly with low power would trip the amp if I
would put more than 200 watts in there, probably the connections I made was
still poor and causing the arcing, so all my 160 QSO's were made barefoot.
Just to give you an idea on what I was dealing with, here's the recording I made
on 40 meters 1 minute before the end of the contest. The bandwidth is 2.0 kHz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuYzmG0aLMk
I apologize for being an alligator, but it is what it is. It is so sad, because
the station has great potential. However, with this kind of noise the station is
hardly usable on Phone.
Overall the contest was great with some pretty good run (best was 261/hr.) and
some juicy mult. As usual, I tried to move mults and I remember I moved some of
them even to 3 bands (like 5T5PA), but it's hard to remember all of them. Big
thank you to all who moved for me.
Thanks for all the QSO's and will be happy to work you from sunny and warm Zone
2 in the CW part!
Thank you for reading this rather long story.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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