[3830] ARRLDX CW K2PS SOAB LP

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                    ARRL DX Contest, CW

Call: K2PS
Operator(s): K2PS
Station: K2PS

Class: SOAB LP
QTH: SNJ
Operating Time (hrs): 34

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:   18    15
   80:  167    59
   40:  402    69
   20:  674    87
   15:   89    45
   10:    0     0
-------------------
Total: 1350   275  Total Score = 1,113,750

Club: Frankford Radio Club

Comments:

The day before the contest my antenna relay control box stopped working. 
Panic'ed calls to Ameritron yielded no help other than suggestions of laborious
component testing with little prospect of success.  I had just thrown up a 160
dipole a couple of days earlier and wanted to test it and the others to get
ready for the contest.  So I was on my own and starting to think about joining
an FRC multi-op team.  But I looked further and noticed that the input voltage
to the control box seemed to be too low, and so I found a new "brick" and
plugged that baby in and voila! the lights came on.  That was easy!  But after
clicking through the antenna positions, it stopped working once more.  Despair
returned.  OK, disconnect the cable and isolate the box (after replacing the
brick once more - good thing I keep a bunch)!  Now it works perfectly!  So up
the tower in the wind I go to pull down the relay switches, bring the box into
the shack, and connect 'em all up.  It works fine!  The relays all trip as
they're supposed to.  So now what?  Maybe there was something wrong with the
new antenna!  Back up the tower and reinstalled the relay box and connected all
but the 160.  And all works perfectly.  Ahhhh.  

So the next day I went and checked out the 160 to see what happened with it,
and saw that the two legs seemed wrapped around one another, so I yanked and
pulled and pulled and yanked and I busted it.  Oy.  By that time it was too
late and too windy to fix it, climb the tower to connect it, and I was just
mentally exhausted with it all.  So I decided that hopefully 160 would just
have a bunch of Caribbeans available that I might be able to work with high SWR
on the 80 dipole, and that there would be no EU opening.

Since I operate in the low power class, 160 should not be too significant for
the overall score, but alas was that ever wrong.  I finally got connected to
the W1VE Getscores site, and my competition became N4YDU since N1UR, N5AW and
the other LP big guns aren't (yet?) connected there.  I took a quick lead over
Nathan (not sure if he knew we were going head-to-head!) and figured I'd just
build from there.  But that strategy fell apart later the first night when it
became apparent that 160 was, uh-oh, gonna be good.  I managed to work a few
DX, including two EU's on my 80 dipole, but getscores.com showed N4YDU piling
up the Q's on that band.  That meant that he was picking up a whole bunch of
mults that were off-limits to me.  I hoped to claw back the next day, and did
somewhat, but he still had a pretty good lead, even though I had him on total
Q's.  After EU sunset, I went out and tried to fix the 160, but after a couple
of hours couldn't get it to tune properly and so never could get back in the
game.

Sunday morning 20 meter EU runs were surprisingly way down, after Saturday
being pretty good, but my 35-40 foot high 2 element wire beam played great on
40 (thanks K3OO), and I had some terrific runs Saturday and especially Sunday
afternoon.  Beat Nathan by about 90 QSO's, but his 160 mults killed me, and so
I lost on total score by about 55K.

Pete, K2PS


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