[3830] ARRL160 W7LT M/S HP

[n7rx at arrl.net]

                     ARRL 160-Meter Contest
                    
Call: W7LT
Operator(s): WA0DIM, N7RX, AL7W, K7RUN, W7PR, AC7KE, KF6PKU, KC7GFX, KD7INU, KK7UE
Station: W7LT

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Portland, OR
Operating Time (hrs): 20
 

Summary:
          QSOs  Sections  Countries
Total:     252     41        3      =  22,572

Club/Team: Portland Amateur Radio Club

Comments:

Maiden voyage of new PARC 160 team and its a long story. Great site at the 1330
AM, 1640 AM and 97.1 FM antenna farm on Mt. Scott outside of Portland. We get
to use one tower at nite when stations are off-air. Seemed like a good idea,
except it turned into a Field Day like operation - set-up and break-down in one
wkend. Ugh.

We fell way behind on
set-up, it was just W7PR and N7RX trying to get three big antennas and the
station set-up Friday afternoon, with K7RUN building pass-reject filters and
diplexers on the fly, and it really wasn't until 0930z Sunday that things
started to shape up at all. The bev we laid out Friday had very high noise
and was useless even with an ANC-4. We put another one  perpendicular to
it, also very noisy and useless, but about 0900z Sunday morning N7RX put the
ANC-4 back in line for kicks and it brought the noise way down. It should
have been left in the rx loop all along. The half-wave sloper we
intended to start the test with had some serious RF in it induced by the 10 Kw
1640 AM tower 25 feet away, and N7RX and KF6PKU got burned (not badly) handling
the coax
connector. K7RUN put together a diplexer for it, but discovered that the
vacuum variable cap he used was no good. Back home he went to get another -
more delay. Plus we were worried abt the borrowed Quadra amp and the 1640
sig, so when we finally had the sloper available we ran at 100 watts out of
the IC-765 instead of 800 w from the Mark V / Quadra. The sloper wouldn't
tune and it took us an hour to figure out that the coax connector at the rig
end was bad. The SWR improved slightly, but not enough, so RUN fixed an old
Heathkit tuner WA0DIM had been using as a doorstop. Everything was so
discombobulated by 0700z Saturday that it took 10 minutes to figure out why
the Mark V wasn't keying - N7RX strikes again; he had put the wrong adapter on
the keyer cord.
Duh. And so on and so on. All in all, Friday was a complete bust. We closed
up shop around 6 am Sat when 1330 AM came back on the tower.

Things settled down substantially on Saturday. The Costco frozen lasagna was
surprisingly good, we got
the Mark V/ Quadra up on the sloper, and N7RX was able to get some decent runs
going on Saturday nite even though his CW basically sucks. (SRI to all those
missed calls - N7RX). It started to
look like DIM would get something going around 0645z Sunday as we prepared to
switch to the tower, but condx were clearly terrible  - we had packet
cluster and DX summit running and could see that nobody was working anybody.
Plus, we had no weak signal ability to copy domestics until about 0900z Sunday
due to the ANc-4 mistake, so we missed a lot there. Not a single JA, no NE,
except NNJ. We worked the VP5, couldn't hear VK6HD this time, even though we
worked him on phone during CQ WW. 

So basically W7PR, K7RUN and N7RX hustled for a month to put a
station together that never went anywhere. The site clearly has lots of
potential, so it was worth the effort. CU Stew Perry. 


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