[3830] CQ160 CW W4EF(@W4EF/6) Single Op Assisted HP

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                    CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW

Call: W4EF
Operator(s): W4EF
Station: W4EF/6

Class: Single Op Assisted HP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 13:02

Summary:
Total:  QSOs = 475  State/Prov = 51  Countries = 32  Total Score = 153,384

Club: Southern California Contest Club

Comments:

RIG: Ten-Tec Omni 6+
AMP: Drake L-7
ANTENNA: 56' Top Loaded Vertical w/34 100' radials

I had intended to do a more serious effort, but by Thursday I was very sick, so
I ended up embracing my "Inner DXer" and chasing countries with the help of the
Telnet cluster and sleeping when the fatigue got really bad. Overall I was
pleased with how my transmit antenna played at the new location. I started out
Friday night running through a 500' roll of LMR-400 and only 2400' of radials.
I added 10 more 100' long radials on Saturday afternoon and shortened the coax
run to ~250'. All told, these mods were probably worth a dB or two in EIRP. 

Saturday afternoon I also got my homebrew W8JI receiving 4-square finished up
(this antenna is similar to the one DX Engineering sells). Unfortunately it
didn't work at all. I checked all the relay's and phasing lines on Sunday
afternoon and found no problems, so my guess is that there is just too much
mutual coupling to the transmit antenna. I probably need to either move the RX
array further away from the TX antenna, de-tune the TX antenna with a relay
during receive, or some combination of the two. 

The back half of my property isn't fenced in and blends in with the several
hundred acres of desert scrub to the north of me. This land is used by local
dirt bikers and ATV enthusiasts, so for the time being I am a little reluctant
to move the receive array too far away from my current fence line were it might
get run over. As a consolation, I was able to combine the receive array output
with my TX antenna using the MFJ noise cancellor I bought a few years back and
get some pretty significant nulling on various signals. That was a lot of fun
to play with. 

Conditions seemed very strange. On both Friday and Saturday night I could hear
lots of Europeans, but most of them were very weak and hard to work. Friday
night east coast stations sounded like they were next door. It was really
amazing. 

Being that I was in DXer mode, I blew off trying to work a lot DX that I could
hear, but didn't need for a new country. This no doubt hurt my multiplier
total, but I was too sick to care. I made a quick list of stuff I heard, but
didn't work and it came out to 17 countries. That means I heard at least 49
DXCC countries over the course of the weekend. I think that may be an all-time
high for me. I also had a decent JA run on Saturday morning which provided a
nice lift to my theretofore lackluster QSO point total. 

Of course, the best part of the weekend was driving home Sunday night without
having to take down the transmit antenna first. That was wonderful :-)

Thanks to everyone for the QSOs. 

Mike W4EF/6


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