ARRL September VHF Contest - 2021
Call: K8GP
Operator(s): W8ZN K1RA K3MM W4XP N2NAR
Station: W8ZN
Class: Limited Multi-Op HP
QTH: VA
Operating Time (hrs): 27
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 262 66
2: 226 61
222: 55 33
432: 67 33
903:
1.2:
2.3:
3.4:
5.7:
10G:
24G:
-------------------
Total: 610 193 Total Score = 142,008
Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club
Comments:
This was my first real contest after my fall in May putting the finishing
touches to the 2m array and shattering my L1 vertebra. I'm about 50% but with
LOTS of help from K1RA, my wife K4MEP and my daughter Michelle, we got the
station somewhat together. Our line up was a 5 ele and a 7 ele beam on 6m, 4x
FO12's + a single FO12 on 2m. 222 had 4x FO12's and 432 had 4x FO25's. All the H
frames had full az/el but we only made eme contacts on 222. All amps were 1kw
SSPA's except 432 which was 500w. 2m showed good conditions from the start and
K3MM milked it as much as possible. We were just too far north and east to get
the good tropo the W4IY got and folks to the south. We lost our main 2m
transverter and had to resort to using the internal 2m transverter in a K3
(marginal at best!!). Next we lost a 432 transverter and the replacement failed
after about an hour but I was able to get it going again - no contest is
complete without Mr. Murphy !!!
Despite our best efforts of sticking to SSB/CW, we all reverted to FT8 since
thats where the action was. We tried telling stations to QSY using TX5 message
"CALL FREQUENCY" but had very limited success and our 222 and 432
scores show that. FT8 (and VERY few use FT4)is so slow in an opening and our 2m
op was being called by 4 and 5 station at a time, he didn't have chance to use
this so we missed a lot on the upper bands. As a group, the VHF community has to
figure out a way to move people or folks will just start abandoning those
bands.
I made a short drone fly over of the site showing the antennas, check it out
https://youtu.be/ATtrAPIAvhs
73 all,
Terry W8ZN
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