AA5B @ WW2Y, 160 phone, sohp

[Draper, Bruce L]

Operating 160 phone and banging your head against a wall have a lot
in common, but both feel much better after you stop. OK, so it takes
a few days ... but it eventually feels better.  Despite that, I
jumped at the opportunity to operate WW2Y's station in the 160 phone
contest (he didn't offer it for CW!).

The fact that I, very much a novice on this band, was able to jump in cold
and do this well is a tribute to how good of a job Peter and Rob (WW2Y
and K2WI) have done putting together their station.  Numbers:

      1250 Qs x 95 mults (39+56) = 315k

    Transmit antennas: 4 inverted Ls in the trees. There will be a detailed
      description of this array in the next NCJ.

    Receive antennas: 6 Beverages.

    Run station:  FT1000 + old surplus Motorola amplifier (1500 W)

    Second radio: TR7. Interlocked to use the same amplifier and 
      xmit antenna as the main radio.

Between hunting through all of the Beverages, searching for new Qs on the
second radio (it paid off with about a dozen mults and lots of Qs), 
and flipping through the 9 different transmit array patterns, I was 
pretty busy. Maybe "overwhelmed" is a better description.

Fairly nice condx on Friday night, except for huge static crashes from a 
storm to the NE (toward Europe, of course). Was able to work 50 Europeans 
through the noise by turning off the AGC and backing way down on the RF gain --
a fairly typical trick on CW, but this time it paid off on phone. A little
rough on the ears, though.

Second night was horrible. Heard only 3 or 4 Europeans all night, and there
were almost no signals from west of the Mississippi. Strange. Even the big
stations didn't move the S-meter. Being stuck way out at one
end of the continent really hurt this year. ON4UN also tells me 
that I made a big tactical error on Saturday night, but I doubt that 
it cost me more than 10 or 20k. Condx just stunk in New Jersey, and 
choice of frequency wouldn't have mattered all that much.

I'm disappointed to beat K1ZM's big score from a few years ago and still 
get clobbered by at least two other stations, but congratulations to WB9Z 
and AA5BL who not only were in the right place at the right time but had 
the great stations and operating ability to take advantage of it.

Already looking forward to the next one (ugh!).

    73,

     Bruce  AA5B