[3830] ARRL 160 KC1XX M/S HP

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                    ARRL 160-Meter Contest

Call: KC1XX
Operator(s): KC1XX W1FV
Station: KC1XX

Class: M/S HP
QTH: NH
Operating Time (hrs): 20:43

Summary:
Total:  QSOs = 1029  Sections = 80  Countries = 58  Total Score = 381,018

Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club

Comments:

This is the first time since 2009 that KC1XX has operated in the ARRL 160
contest.  We had hoped to put in a serious M/S effort but limited operator
availability reduced us to an operation that was somewhat casual by KC1XX
standards, with a number of hours off the air.

We did a lot of work on our 160m antennas recently.  We overhauled our 3-element
inline transmit vertical array and ended up totally retuning it.  Over the
years, the antenna had suffered varying degrees of damage, ranging from fallen
or broken elevated radials to the loss (and eventual replacement) of one of the
tower verticals after a tree fell on it.  As a result, the repairs and
rebuilding resulted in a system that had fallen out of tune.

In the past month, KC1XX also installed two horizontal dipoles, one E/W and the
other N/S, both 200 feet up.  One of our goals in this contest was to gain more
experience with the dipoles relative to the vertical array.  Suffice to say that
the comparisons were very interesting, with each antenna showing advantages over
the other at different times.  We found 160m propagation seems to show
pronounced polarization dependence at times where one antenna is far down from
the other on some stations, only to reverse at a later time.

We found DX conditions to be only fair at best.  Propagation into Europe went
into a lull through the middle of both nights but came back relatively strongly
towards European sunrise.  The second night was plagued with static crashes from
a regional rain storm.  We could hear multiple stations calling us, but it was a
struggle to pick out callsigns through the QRN.  

We missed the NT, AK, and NNY sections despite NNY being almost in our backyard.


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