[3830] NewEngQP W1KBN M/S HP

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                    New England QSO Party

Call: W1KBN
Operator(s): NI1L W1HIS
Station: W1KBN

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Boston, MA
Operating Time (hrs): 14

Summary:
 Band  CW-Dig Qs  Ph Qs
------------------------
   80:      0        0
   40:    130       21
   20:    317       92
   15:    157        0
   10:     11        0
------------------------
Total:    615      113  Mults = 80  Total Score = 107,440

Club: Northeastern University Radio Club

Comments:

Some time ago Chuck W1HIS and I came up with the idea of activating a rare or
semi-rare county in this year’s NEQP. Suffolk county appears to be usually
underrepresented in NEQP and since until recently I was a graduate student at
Northeastern University making a ‘dxpedition’ to the Northeastern’s Radio
Club W1KBN seemed like a great idea. The problem was â€" I’d never
actually been there. I knew the club was there, saw the 
antenna on the roof but since in the past several years I worked individually
with my advisor I rarely ever ventured to the campus and never really had the
opportunity to see the club and meet the people. A few weeks ago I shot an
email to N1QD who worked from there last year but didn’t get a response (my
message ended up in a spam box) and
didn’t really followed up on that until a week before the contest when Chuck
started asking me difficult questions ;) Anyway â€" somehow got hold of
Joe N1QD who, turns out, graduated and left the club but he referred me to Dave
K1MBO who is a faculty advisor of the club. I stopped by his office on Tuesday
morning and he showed me the station made the club available for us for the
contest. 
The club has at the moment two antennas â€" a tribander and a random wire.
Chuck and I decided to bring out own radios as the club’s TenTec was reported
to have some unspecified problems with the narrow CW filter. We were lucky to
secure a triplexer and bandpass filters on short notice so the idea was to work
two higher bands on the same antenna during the day. As neither of use has an
amplifier that would be considered ‘portable’ we decided to go low power.
We met on the campus around 10am on Saturday morning, hauled our stuff up to
the fifth floor of Hayden Hall where the clubhouse is and the fun began. We
quickly assembled two operating positions. We connected the triplexer and I
connected my radio to 15m port through a bandpass filter. I used the built-in
tuner to match the antenna and everything seemed to be fine until I started to
transmit. I immediately noticed that the tuner would not rest when I was
transmitting â€" it would randomly try to match and re-match the antenna.
After turning the tuner off and putting low-power steady carrier on just by
observing the behavior of SWR meter in the rig it became obvious that the
tribander has a bad connection in one of it’s elements. That was later
confirmed by Chuck’s SWR scan of the tribander using a vector analyzer.
The prospects looked grim â€" 10m and 15m were unusable with the autotuner
on and had SWR high enough without a tuner that the radio was reducing the
output power to 30W. 
Fortunately I was able to use an external tuner that was in the club to find a
position on 15m  in which regardless of the beam element’s contact the SWR
presented to the radio was approx 1.5, which my radio seemed to tolerate
without any significant power reduction. We had no such luck with 10m but since
10m never really opened it wasn;t a big issue.
The random wire antenna was thought to be usable on low bands. It was actually
marginal on 40m â€" we were able to load it with an external tuner but SWR
of the antenna itself was very high so most of the power seemed to go to make
the coax warm. No luck with 80m â€" we couldn’t find a match using two
different external tuners so we had to forgo 80m operation.
Despite the antenna troubles we had a ton of fun operating and we made more
than 700 QSOs. W1KBN seems to have a good location with relatively tame noise
level for the center of big city (admittedly â€" during a weekend, not
sure how worse it is on weekdays). 
Chuck and I offered our help with any club projects and fixing the tribander
and replacing the random wire with something that works on low bands seem to be
top two priorities. I’m sure that was not the last time W1KBN is heard in a
contest.
We would like to once again thank Dave K1MBO for his support and for making the
club station available to us for the contest.

Les NI1L


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