[3830] CQ160 CW PA3FYM Single Op Assisted HP

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                    CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW

Call: PA3FYM
Operator(s): PA3FYM
Station: PA3FYM

Class: Single Op Assisted HP
QTH: 
Operating Time (hrs): 29

Summary:
Total:  QSOs = 998  State/Prov = 16  Countries = 61  Total Score = 404,635

Club: 

Comments:

Two weeks before this contest I was faced with a big 
disappointment. Apparently there had been some miscommunication/
confusion with the land owner where the Beverages resided. 

In this time frame it became clear he rented his land to a farmer 
for sheep to graze. In practice this meant the NW/SE, W/E and NE/SW Beverages
had to be removed and serious thinking was necessary to create 'plan B'.

Together with Richard PA7FA we managed to move the JA-Bev and 
maintain its direction. However, the US-Bev faced another fate.

With a lot of squeezing this Bev ran ca. 1m parallel to a large metal 
green house and pointed towards 335-degrees, which is Greenland and 
Canada from an European perspective.

There was no space anymore to put up a W/E-Beverage.

In an attempt to compensate this suboptimal RX-setup within the 
boundary conditions, I recalculated K9AY-loops, optimised them for 1.83 MHz
and roughly pointed them towards E/W and N/S. 

Although the optimised loops performed flabbergastingly well and showed 
very deep notches, these kind of loops unfortunately 
can't compensate (the comfort of) Beverages.  

As the loops were placed ca. 20m from the TX-vertical, the latter had to be 
detuned during reception. This was the first time I had to detune the shunt 
fed vertical and it worked really well. Some experiments during the contest
revealed that the difference between 'detune' and 'tune' was 'copy' and 'no
copy'. 

With mixed feelings I started the contest and sometimes believed that 
'plan B' wasn't working at all. Signals abroad were scarce and extremely weak.
It took me a while to believe that the atmospheric conditions had to be 
very suboptimal during the first stint. 

The second stint was a little better, but still hard work to copy scarce
signals
abroad. 

Fortunately during the last stint some JA's popped up, as well as BA7IO. 

Not being a 160m-expert I think that propagation during this contest must 
have been the worse in years. 

Nevertheless, it was fun to participate and my unlucky Beverage fate yielded
some improvements and new ideas. 

Last, but not least, thanks to Richard PA7FA and Marion for their friendship
and hospitality!

73, Remco PA3FYM


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