New England QSO Party - 2023
Call: AB1XW/P
Operator(s): AB1XW
Station: AB1XW/P
Class: Single Op QRP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs): 0.5
Summary:
Band CW-Dig Qs Ph Qs
------------------------
80:
40: 11
20:
15:
10:
------------------------
Total: 11 0 Mults = 8 Total Score = 176
Club: Hampden County Radio Association
Comments:
I'm submitting two logs; this is the one for my portable station. With
the weather forecast looking uncharacteristically gorgeous for this
year's NEQP, I scrambled to pull off something I've been hoping to do
for a few years now: a QRP portable/mobile entry. The rules define
that category, but nobody has ever entered it. Unless someone else did
the same thing this year and also operated from HARCT, this entry
should establish a new, and I expect easily broken, record.
Since I didn't decide to try this until the last minute, I was
completely unprepared. The result was a very small-scale operation,
but a huge amount of learning.
After discovering that my old Weber Tribander now only transmits on
40m, I reverted to my only other portable QRP rig, a 3-band KD1JV
"Mountain Topper" I built a few years ago as a beta tester. The MTR
is
a wonderful little special-purpose transceiver. Unfortunately, its
special purpose is ultralight SOTA activations, not contesting.
With the rig figured out, I sorted through my portable antenna options
and started testing different configurations. That yielded a bunch of
useful data, but no contacts by dinnertime. Following a nice meal with
my wife and daughter, I retreated to the basement ham shack and
tinkered with my home contesting setup. That also needed some work,
updates, and reconfiguration; as I was doing those things I also
completed a handful of QSOs. I've submitted those in my other log, for
the sake of the folks I worked.
Sunday, with my portable setup finally looking usable, I headed out to
Windsor Locks Canal State Park in Somers, Connecticut. My wife went
for a run on the canal trail while I set up a POTA-style operation
under a convenient antenna tree. The MTR was feeding a manual BLT
tuner with a pair of 33-foot speaker wires attached, one up the tree
and the other laid out on the ground as a counterpoise.
20 meters didn't sound very active, so I found an open frequency on
the only other contest band available to me, 40 meters. This is
usually a two-band contest anyway, so that was fine. 30 minutes of
CQing yielded 11 QSOs with stations scattered around the northeast,
plus one Canadian. Not bad for a whopping 3 watts and an improvised
antenna. I didn't even try to do S&P, as scanning the band on the MTR
isn't practical. It's a run rig.
Now that I've pioneered this category, I'm anxious to do more with it,
and would love to see other folks take it up as well. Tom's going to
have to add a whole new column to the results and records tables, with
a whole bunch of empty records waiting to be set. There's plenty of
room for me to improve my setup, too. Consider this a challenge.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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