While not everything was perfect for us during last weekends ARRL DX SSB
Contest, one thing went extremely well. Here's the story...
We were a casual M/2 operation. On Sunday morning, I was operating 10m and W1VE
was on the 15m station. We were running like crazy. Suddenly, there was a power
glitch in the house. The Acom amps turned off. All the digital clocks in the
house were blinking. The refrigerator went through its self-test sequence.
Except for having to restart the Acom amps, the entire contest station -
radios, computers, accessories - stayed on-the-air . We didn't miss a beat.
Why? A few months ago, after some disastrous brushes with lightning, one of the
protective measures I took was to buy a used 2kVA UPS on eBay. The unit powers
EVERY 110vac device in my office/shack. The UPS sustained the power to
everything through the glitch - eliminating what would have been, at a minimum,
a costly 30+ minute recovery process to get all the computers, logs and radios
back on-the-air. And, it could have been a lot worse than that! ["Excuse me,
ZF2MM, we had a little power failure up here. May I please have my frequency
back?" I don't think so.]
Needless to say, I highly recommend a UPS for the well-prepared contester's
shack!
73,
Jim Idelson K1IR
email k1ir@designet.com
web http://www.designet.com/k1ir
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