[3830] 8P5A - Just another day in Paradise

[Georgens, Tom]

It all started out so promising

 

On a prior trip I had completed a project to replace one of my
tribanders with monobanders for 15 and 20.  Coincidentally, when I
arrived to do the project, I found that the boom had broken on the
tribander I intended to replace.  Timing could not have been more
perfect.

 

For the contest, my wife Kathleen and I flew down on the redeye on the
Monday night before the contest.  Kathleen was hobbled a bit after
having knee surgery a few weeks ago.  Our flight to Barbados
uncharacteristically arrived about 20 minutes early, and we passed
through customs and immigration in record time.  We ended up getting to
the station around 2:30 PM, about three hours before sundown.  In the
limited daylight we made good progress and installed the RX 4-square and
the 160 inverted L with raised radials.  We also put up a tarp canopy
outside the door of the operating room.  It was as much as we ever
accomplished on arrival day.

 

When the sun went down, we went to the house we rent to unpack and have
a brief meal.    After dinner, I returned to the station to continue the
inside setup and check out.  I had some new gear to install.  I had some
new switching to accommodate the additional antennas as well as a
homebrew power monitoring box.  I also bring a box that does all of the
station control that has about 40 cables attached to it.  With
everything finally connected, I could do some station testing.  The
rotors were fine and all the antennas looked good as well.  Oddly, the
80 meter antenna read very differently on the wattmeter than it did on
the K3 radio.  While I have no confidence in the accuracy of the K3 SWR
measurements, the results were still surprisingly different.  My only
assumption was that the bandpass filters were distorting the impedance
as seen by the K3.  

 

On the other hand, the switching did not quite work right, and one of
the channels on the two port homebrew wattmeter did not work.  It was
now late after a long day, and nothing  could not wait for another day.

 

Early Wednesday morning we returned to the station and I installed the
80 meter array pointed at Europe.  We also replaced one leg of the 80
meter inverted V as W2GD told me that a leg was about to break when he
did some tower work a couple of weeks earlier.  By noon on Wednesday,
all of the outdoor antenna work seemed to be done, as early as any trip
that I could recollect.  We then took on a project that has been long
overdue, air conditioning the operating room.   The owner gave us
permission to install air conditioning, but it was not possible to
arrange a permanent installation in time,  so we decided to get a
portable room unit.  The shack is merely and 8 X 10 foot room and should
be coolable with one of the models.  After some calls, we found a unit
and drove down to pick it up.  Upon returning to the shack, we placed
the air conditioner, routed the exhaust hose and invented a way to vent
it out a window.

 

Pleased with the progress we went out to dinner and got some rest.
After returning, Kathleen stayed at the house and I returned to the
shack to do some more setting up.  I was using a new computer and had to
load some drivers to get my custom rotor control software to work.  I
also found out that the wattmeter problem was a bad cable.  I also found
that the switching problem was some bad relays.  After fixing all the
issues, I got on the air and made some QSO's on 80 and 160.
Unfortunately, when I tried my other amp, a   Centurion,  it failed
while I was tuning it up for the first time.  I just replaced it with my
TL922 spare and returned home to watch the baseball game and get some
rest.

 

Thursday morning we went back up to the station, but not as early as
usual.  I spent some time on the high bands and made the first QSO's
with the new monobanders.  The 15 meter monobander was noticeably better
than the TH7 on a separate tower at a similar height.  I also found that
that the Centurion problem was a bad tube and worked as usual with a
replacement.  Kathleen went back to the house to relax and then do food
shopping while I continued to ready the station.  I  struggled to get
the K3 audio to sound decently, but eventually decided it was good
enough.  I had new Bose headphones with the K1EP mod to add a
microphone, and needed to take some steps to eliminate RF distortion.
With that complete, the station was ready and I spent the rest of the
time cleaning  up the room.  I like the station to be neat  for the
contest.

 

We had another dinner at a beach side restaurant.  Over dinner we
discussed that the portable air conditioner was a disappointment and
thought of ideas that might make it better.  We both went back to the
station and tried to reduce the leakage and insulate the exhaust hose.
While there, I made a few more low band QSO's.  On 80 I made some A/B
tests with the 80 meter antennas as was very pleased that the EU array
was over 10 db better than the inverted V.  I was feeling really good
about the station.

 

On Friday we slept a bit later and drove up in the morning.  I did
another station checkout, ran the pileups a bit, and premarked the
amplifiers.  We then went back to the house for some rest.  Unlike many
other contests, I actually got some sleep and it did not seem like I was
lying  awake for hours.  Around 4 PM, we drove back up to the station
for one last checkout before the sun went down.  We tested the receive
4-square and each of the transmit antennas.   What I did notice was that
I now had an indicator problem on one of the rotators.  My custom
software, can adjust for this, but the indicator was drifting and not
off by a constant amount.  It was frustrating to have a last minute
problem, but it was too late to do anything about it.

 

We returned to the house and I tried to get some more rest.  While we
were home, it started to rain heavily and the wind picked up.  It is
common to have torrential rain, so I did not think much of it.  Kathleen
looked up the weather on line and said that the weather map did not look
good.  She suggested that I should look at it, but I passed since it did
not change anything.  I was more interested in getting my game face on.

 

After the precontest spaghetti dinner I arrived at the station about 30
minutes before the start.  After some last minute adjustments, it was
time to go.  I like to start on the highest band possible, but it was
clear that 20 meters was not an option.  There were no US stations to be
heard so I would have to start on 40 for the first time in a CQWW SSB.
I decided to go below the US phone band and try to open by running
Europeans.  Warming up before the contest was hardly promising.  I was
getting great reports, but few answers.  

 

Eventually 0000Z rolled around and the first few minutes were solid, but
then things got slow.  It was hard to sustain an EU run.  I was picking
up mults on 20 on the second radio, but it was not an auspicious start
with only 121 Q's in the first hour.  My worst CQWW start ever.  A few
years back, I worked 1000 Q's by 230Z.  After that,  things improved and
I had some solid US runs on 80 and 40 and the rates picked up.  My trip
to 160 was a disappointment as the band was noisy and signals were weak.
80 was similarly noisy, but signals were very strong.  The RX 4-square
was a big help.

 

At one point, NP4Z called in and made a very serious sounding statement
wishing me good luck with the storm.  At the time, I did not know what
he meant.  However, precipitation static on 40 drove me off the band
twice.  I also got up to go to the bathroom a couple of times, which
requires that I go outside, only to find that it was pouring out and I
deferred my trip.  Over the course of the contest, the lights flickered
a number of times so I knew that something was happening outside, but I
could not hear anything due to the noise cancelling headphones.

 

I had a very good run on 80 where I worked a significant number of EU
stations and many good EU mults.  I had eventually clawed my way back
and passed my QSO rate from last year.  Now I was feeling pretty good
and getting into a groove.  Last year I made about 550 Q's on 80 for the
entire contest.  This year I was already at 500 by 7Z.  I could also
tell from the RX 4-square that the noise was peaking in the SW
direction.  This led me to believe that the storm had passed.  However,
all of that changed at 701Z when the lights went out.

 

I called my wife back at the house and told her of the issue.  It was
3AM.  She was reassuring and said that she still had power.  This is the
second time in a major contest that I had a power fail on the first
night and could not help but to rethink my decision to not invest in a
generator.  My plan was to put my head down on the desk to get some
rest.  The return of the electricity would wake me up if I fell asleep.
One thing I did notice was that, without the headphones, I could hear
that the weather was raging outside.  I became more pessimistic that
power would be on soon as the weather seemed too severe for anybody to
attempt a repair of power lines.

 

I did doze a bit, but it was very loud.  Around 530AM the sun started to
come up.  Through the glass shack door,  I could see that the canopy we
put up outside had completely collapsed and the tarp was flapping
violently.  With the tarp out of the way, I could see a tree thrashing
wildly and the power lines moving like a jump rope.  This was not like
any storm I had seen in Barbados.  I could see one of my three towers,
the crankup, about 30 feet from the shack.  The monobanders on top has
slipped in the rotor and had moved at least 30 degrees.  

 

It dawned on me that it was probably not a good idea to have the crankup
extended in the gale winds.  I went out in the wind and pouring rain to
get a better look, and the tower was clearly stressed.  I had leaves
sticking to my face and my glasses covered with rain as I tried to crank
down the tower.  Unfortunately, as I released the cable, it immediately
went slack.  The bending of the tower was creating too much friction for
the tower to slide down.  After about a minute, the tower did slip and
the cable was taut once again.  I repeated the process by letting out
some cable, and waiting for the tower to slip.  This went on for the
next ten minutes and the tower retracted one inch at a time.  I was
hoping the upper cable was doing the same but I could not see a thing if
I looked up.  Eventually, the tower was aligned enough to come down
normally.  Before heading back in, I took a look at the other two towers
I cannot see from inside the shack.  The tall tower had the antennas
slip as well, but the yagis themselves looked intact.  The BX tower on
the other side of the house looked fine, and the TH7 was still in the
same direction.

 

Back inside, I was soaking wet.  While not in immediate danger, for the
first time I felt that this was not a good situation.  One fear was
that, with glass doors on the shack, if something came crashing through
the door, I could get hurt.  Even if I was not injured, if the glass was
broken, it would be difficult to keep the wind and rain out.  As a
precaution, I put a big tarp over the gear.   In order to get my mind
off the situation, and to kill time, I decided to organize the closet in
the shack since it was long overdue and I needed to dispose of a lot of
old junk.  In the process, I found an AM/FM/Shortwave radio that was
crank and battery operated.  I tuned in the local CBC station.  They had
people calling in reporting on what they were seeing on the island.  It
was a continuous stream of stories about flooding, lost power, blown off
roofs, and fallen trees.

 

One thing that remained intact was the mobile phone network.  I had my
phone charging until the power failed so I was able to call the house to
check on Kathleen.  By sunrise, she had lost electricity as well.  She
was safe in a full size cement block  house, but she was alone.  We
spoke several times over the course of the morning.  Since I had the
radio, I was able to give her updates.

 

Around 1 PM, 10 hours after the power went out, it looked like the
weather was moderating.  I called Kathleen and we discussed her coming
to pick me up.  We agreed that she would turn back at the first sign of
danger.  While I was waiting, I ran into the field north of the station
to get some of the RX 4-square hardware.  Each of the four elements had
blown down, but I wanted to get the electronics inside.  The central
switching box was sitting in a puddle and the entire field had at least
one inch of standing water.  Kathleen was taking a long time so I
brought in all the gear and cables.  In the process, I observed that a
barn on the farm had collapsed and the solar water heater on the house
across the way had blown off the roof and landed about 100 feet away.  I
also saw that a perfectly placed branch that supported one of my raised
radials had broke off pulling that radial tight, yanking the feedpoint
stake out of the ground, and raising it about 10 feet in the air.

 

Eventually Kathleen arrived.  Several of her paths to the station had
been blocked and she was eventually escorted to the main highway by a
police car.  The road to my station had a fallen palm tree in the road
that had taken down all the wires to the farm.  I brought the radio and
my computers out to the car and we took off.  Looking back, the towers
and antennas still were intact, except that one leg of the 160 inverted
V had fallen.

 

On the ride back, we saw many downed trees, and a sight we saw many
times over the next few days.  People were chopping up large branches
and fallen trees by hand with machetes.  We got back to the house, which
had no electricity.  However, since water was solar heated on the roof,
I could take a hot shower.  We ended up eating the food Kathleen was
going to bring up to me to eat during the contest.  Before going to bed,
I had a sudden concern, which turned out to be ridiculous in retrospect,
that all my gear was still on and covered with the tarps.  Should the
power come back the amps might overheat.

 

When the sun came up the next morning, the rain had stopped, but the
wind was still gusting.  I wanted to get back to the station should the
electricity be back on.  Our main road to the station was blocked by
cones so we tried an alternate.  We got to about 200 feet from the
driveway when the road was blocked by several fallen trees.  I got out
of the car to walk the rest of the way and Kathleen sought an alternate
path.  When I got to the station, I saw streetlight parts from a mercury
light that was installed about 200 feet away.  There were 15 foot long
palm branches against the cottage and under the crankup tower.  With the
contest clearly over, it was time to take down the temporary antennas.
I pulled in the radials, one of which was broken by a fallen tree.  A
rope supporting the reflector for the 80 meter array had a number of
branches fall on it and needed to be freed.

 

With all the antennas that had fallen, or that were in threat of
breaking having been freed, it was time to check the permanent antennas.
I had an AIM 4170 antenna analyzer and my laptop to sweep the antennas,
despite not having any power.  Incredibly, all of the antennas but the
TH7 were exactly as expected.  The TH7 had no obvious damage from the
ground, and may have just been water in the traps.  Instead of taking
down the 80 meter array, I retuned the antenna for CW in preparation for
the CQWW CW.  Similarly, I adjusted the 80 meter inverted V.  Whether
due to disappointment or disbelief, everything went very slowly.  Around
noon, Kathleen called to say that there was no longer any water at our
house.  She also said the ham about 500 feet from our house had lost his
tower.  He had a Log Periodic on an aluminum tower.

 

We stopped by one of the public water sources to gut buckets of water to
flush the toilets.  Fortunately, before the storm, we had stocked up on
drinks and bottled water for both of the CQWW contest weekends.  With
the wind lessening, and the rain becoming more sporadic, I decided to
start the tower work and I redirected the monobanders on the crankup to
the correct direction.  Unfortunately, without power, I could not retest
the rotors.

 

Before dark, Kathleen decided to use here girl scout training to create
a barbecue.  She had some charcoal and built a chimney out of tin foil.
Using the makeshift grill, she cooked potatoes and pork chops (my
intended post contest meal)  for dinner.  It was delicious.

 

On Monday morning, the power had still not returned.  Since I had to
climb the tall tower to rotate the antenna, I decided to replace the
rotor that had the indicator problem.  From the shack I could see the
resistance across the indicator pot was at least 100 ohms higher than it
should have been.  When I got to the top of tower, I opened up the
connector in the rotor cable and confirmed the same measurement looking
into the rotor, indicating a rotor, and not a cable, issue.  After
swapping the rotor, there appeared to be a bad connection and it took
two more trips up the tower to fix it.  I reoriented the 40 meter beam.
Unfortunately, up close to the 40 meter beam, I could see that the boom
had cracked on the top.  It was being held together by the truss.  There
was no way to attempt a fix and the hope is that it will stay in one
piece until a repair can be made.

 

With the rotor replaced, but not testable, it was time to look at the
TH7.  Since the rain had stopped, the beam SWR was returning to normal.
In order to be sure it was not a cable problem, I climbed the BX tower
and measured the SWR at the balun.  The problem was no different.  I had
a spare DX Engineering balun to experiment with,  but I could not make
jumpers without electricity.  Instead I left the antenna with the hope
that it would return to normal.  I have certainly seen this happen with
Hy-Gain tribanders before.  At that point there was nothing left to do
but close up the station and secure the wire antennas until CQWW CW.

 

With no electricity at the shack or the house, we were recharging the
computers and the phones in the car.  We routinely left the car running
simply to keep the battery operated devices charging.  However, by
Monday night, parts of the island had power restored.  We called around
to find a restaurant that was open and we went out for dinner.  It was
great to feel some air conditioning again.

 

We were up at 4:45 AM on Tuesday for our trip home.  Power was still not
on and it was over 72 hours since the original outage.  The airport was
operational and we departed with no issues.

 

It was a disappointing outcome to a highly anticipated weekend.
However, I have had too many great experiences operating from Barbados
for me to dwell on the negative.  My inconvenience is inconsequential
compared to the destruction experienced by the people of Barbados from
the worst storm to hit the island in 55 years.  This only compounded
their grief after the death of their Prime Minister at age 48 one week
earlier.   The people of Barbados have always been gracious, welcoming
and friendly to Kathleen and I, and we wish them the best on a rapid
recovery.

 

I would once again like to thank my wife Kathleen for her continued
support and her patience in dealing with a very challenging situation.

 

Thanks to everybody for the Q's and QSL via NN1N

 

One last thing, the name of the storm, Hurricane Tomas.  Oh, the irony

 

73, Tom W2SC 8P5A