CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW - 2020
Call: EA3M
Operator(s): EA3M
Station: EA3M
Class: Single Op Assisted LP
QTH: Barcelona
Operating Time (hrs): 9
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 333 State/Prov = 13 Countries = 53 Total Score = 123,750
Club: Catalonia Contest Club
Comments:
Everything started on our way back from CQWW CW (we were part of the EF2X team)
when Ariel EA3CX and I discussed about future contests. After talking for a
while we decided that we would rent a little house that he knew on top of a hill
close to the Mediterranean coast and build a 4 square antenna + 2 beverages.
This was a big challenge as we had to ensemble it in one day, but we were
confident. After many weekends working on the preparations (many thanks to
Lluís EA3CI for the help) the big day arrived.
It was 9AM when we started working. If anybody believes that ham radio is not a
sport, I invite him/her to join us next time because I don’t remember myself
doing as much activity as I did that day :-)
We didn’t have lunch (there was no time), and we barely had dinner. We were
just walking up and down the hill, and up and down roof of the house (the
verticals were actually inverted-L antennas towards a big mast on the roof of
the house, right in the center of the square). We tested the antenna around 15
min after the beginning of the contest and… SWR 3:1. Each of the elements
individually was working as expected, the quarter wave lines were really a
quarter wave, etc. etc., but as soon as we phased them they showed resonance at
1.610 MHz, which did not change at all after desperately cutting a big chunk of
the antennas. We believe the problem has to be in the phasing box, we will
investigate it in the forthcoming days.
In any case, we were very very tired. Ariel decided to go to sleep so I started
the contest in LP (less than 50w) with SWR 3:1. The reception was good and the
directionality was clear, but nobody could hear me. So frustrating! I managed to
do 333 QSOs before the sunrise.
However before going to bed with the sun already up on the sky, Ariel had the
great idea of phasing two verticals without the box so that the system could
have an impedance of 50 Ohms (the 50 Ohm coax cable was too short to reach any
of the verticals, so we had to feed them with the 75 Ohm quarter wave line coax,
which turned them into 100 Ohm). Not optimal, but at least we would be able to
turn on the amplifier. So we decided that on Saturday afternoon we would build
the two beverages we did not have time to finish on the previous day and at
least have some fun during the second night.
But of course, this was not our contest: at the beginning of the afternoon, the
light was cut. There have been very heavy storms during the week, and the energy
company told us that they were doing maintenance because of this. No clue when
the electricity would be restored. And that was too much. At that moment, Ariel
and I looked at each other and started to dismantle. We got home on Saturday
night at around 22:00 local time.
Many many thanks to Ariel EA3CX for his patience and energy, you cannot imagine
how hard he works and how much knowledge he has! Also congratulations to all the
participants, specially those who had the patience and ability to deal with the
tiny signal I was probably producing and answer the call I was making with my
new shiny callsign (I officially got it less than 24h before the contest, I was
EC3TW previously).
We will be back!
73,
Roger EA3M
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