[3830] NA Sprint CW W4EF HP

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                    NA Sprint CW Contest - February

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

Class: Single Op HP
QTH: CA
Operating Time (hrs): 1.5

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Op Time
---------------------
   80:  87       33
   40:             
   20:             
---------------------
Total:  87     Mults = 33  Total Score = 2,871

Club: Southern California Contest Club

Team: SCCC #1

Comments:

Rig:  FT1000MP MKV (200 watts output)
  Antenna: 160 mtr Inverted-L

My apologies to my fellow SCCC team mates for the less than stellar score. I
had fully intended to drive to my remote shack and do a full effort, but mother
nature intervened late Saturday morning with a rather nasty "plumping problem".
When it became clear that the issue wasn't going to resolve itself in time for
me to make the trip to the remote shack, I shot an email to Doug hoping that he
could swap somebody from SCCC team #2 into my place on team #1. Unfortunately, I
think it was too late to make a change.

I spent most of the rest of the day on the porcelain operating chair. About
0200 UTC, I decided that I had recovered enough that it was "safe" to give it a
go from my home station. The first order of business was to try getting an
amplifier up and running. I've got a whole pile of HF amplifiers here (8 or 9),
but the only one which I thought was still working was my spare Drake L-7. The
power supply for this amp died during the Stew Perry contest, but I had brought
my other supply down from the remote shack to change out one of the 50K
wirewounds used to derive the tube cutoff bias from the anode supply. This 50K
resistor still works, but it has a hot spot which causes it to glow in the dark
perdiodically (scary, huh?). This supply is setup for 120V since I don't have
220V in my remote shack yet, so I had to take the bottom off of the L-7 amp
spare and change the filament jumpers before I could use the supply with the
spare amp (the spare amp was setup for 220V). 

After some fiddling about, I got the amplifier and power supply connected. The
The tube filaments lit up okay and high voltage looked good on the meter, but
when I tried tuning up, nothing. It looks like the RF path to the tube cathode
is open or shorted somewhere - rats! My antenna system here is pretty lame, so
I wasn't real keen on running low-power. I decided to run the FT1K Mark V at
the full 200 watts even though this put me into the high power category (as if
it was going to matter at this late juncture). 

Operating 40 meters would have required that I go outside in the rain and pull
a jumper off the base loading coil for my 160 meter inverted-L, so I decided to
go single-band 80 meters. My K1EL Winkeyer was up at the remote shack, so I had
to send everything by hand. I am sure this readily apparent to everyone who
worked me as my CW fist was even worse than my usual sloppy-choppy sending (no
I wasn't drinking, it just sounded that way). I'll blame it on the plumping
problem as that ordeal had left me pretty drained and I hadn't eaten all day.
Still it was nice to get on and be able to at least turn in a log. I even
worked a few east coast guys which was nice. When I slowed the keyer down, I
got off a few exchanges that sounded like they were sent by the computer which
helped diminish that feeling of being a total lid. 

Thanks for all the QSOs. 

73, Mike W4EF.............

P.S. Does anyone know a good proctologist?


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