[3830] CQWW SSB K5TR SO(A)AB HP
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Sun Nov 3 11:41:25 EST 2019
CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB - 2019
Call: K5TR
Operator(s): K5TR
Station: K5TR
Class: SO(A)AB HP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): ~45
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 46 14 29
80: 131 24 72
40: 776 31 102
20: 707 32 108
15: 423 26 89
10: 119 12 28
------------------------------
Total: 2202 139 428 Total Score = 2,583,252
Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club
Comments:
I always look forward to getting on the bands in the CQ WW no matter
what the sun is doing or not doing. Not much has changed at the
station in the last year just working on little things. I was hoping
to get some new 10m and 15m yagis built but progress has been
slow. The weekend before the CQ WW I did work on the receive antennas
- I have four 500 ft beverages and one was on the ground and broken.
I got that fixed up along with one of the feeds on the SAL30 four loop
array. They seemed to be working well during the Stew Perrry event on
160 meters.
I also did some work on the automatic band switching here in the
shack. I have two old top ten devices band decoders that I have
mostly used in manual mode over the years. And now that I have some
auto tune amps getting the automatic band switching working finally
got up high enough on the list to really try to figure out. And I
solved one issue and as I found out in the contest only partially
fixed the other. So still more work to do there. The good news is
that it works perfectly now on the bands below 15 meters. But I still
have some RF on 15. And it is much worse on 10 meters. I have improved
it - it was faulting off at just 20 watts on 10 meters so I think this
can be solved. It was really nice to just move the radio or logging
program from 160 to 80 all night long - something I do very often -
and not have to worry about the amp or ant band switch.
The only other issue, Thursday night before the contest we had a cold
front blow through and it was very windy. And on Friday the wind was
very stiff and gusty. When I got up Friday morning I looked to make
sure all the antennas were still up - and noticed that the 20 meter
yagi was not pointed where I was sure I had left it - so I checked the
control box and confirmed that it was off. I was going to just
recalibrate the display but when I turned the antenna I noticed that
it seemed to be slipping in the mast clamp. Since I put this rotator
into service back in July it was not a surprise that it might be
slipping a bit at this point - maybe I did not get it tight enough.
Anyway I decided I would do that about an hour before the contest
after taking a nap. So I went to sleep. I was also hoping that as
the day wore on the wind - which was still howling at 2pm - would slow
down a bit. When I woke up the wind was still blowing but maybe not
quite as bad as it was in the morning. I went up the tower to 70 ft
were the rotator is and noticed right away that that three of the four
bolts holding the rotator to the rotator plate were missing and the
mast was not slipping in the clamp but the rotator was turning in the
tower until it hit the rungs and would stop so it was moving back and
forth in the wind.
Sigh.
I got this rotator used this summer from K5AND - when I told him I
needed to fix the Alpha Spid that had failed. We were talking and he
said that I could take an extra Orion that he had. When I picked this
rotor up from him this summer one of the things I noted when he was
loading this stuff in my car was the the bolts he gave me to mount it
to the rotator plate had fine threads. They are 3/8-24 3/4" long
bolts. Your common 3/8 bolt is a 3/8-16.
So now I am up at 70 feet in the cold breeze, about 30 minutes until
the start of the CQ WW, with the sun setting. I have a number of
thoughts going through my mind.
- There was not a single bolt in my bag or anywhere on the tower that
would fit in the bottom of this rotator.
- I was pretty sure that K5AND had only given me 5 or maybe 6 of these
bolts that day back in the summer.
- Could I find the bolt(s)?
- This is a bolt that I am pretty sure Home Depot does not stock.
- If I did not find the bolts would this just get worse in the next 24
to 48 hours?
- This is the only 20 meter antenna that rotates.
- 20 meters was going to be very hard if I could not point this antenna.
- Maybe a single band 40 meter effort would be fun.
So I climbed down the tower, I spent about 5 minutes looking around
the base of the tower on the off chance that I would spot one of the
three missing bolts. I did not. I went in the garage and dug around
in the things I had gotten with the rotator and found one of the
bolts. I headed back out to the tower and spent another 5 minutes
looking for bolts on the ground before giving up and climbing back to
the rotator and hoping that the wind would either lay enough to allow
me to move the rotator to line up the holes or that the wind would
shift and move the rotator to line up the holes or get the close. I
pushed and pried on it but it was not moving and the wind was still
blowing very strong and steady. So I waited.
After about 10 minutes the wind finally shifted and I was able to get a
screw driver into one of the bolt holes and pull and line it up - I
quickly got the bolt in being very careful not to drop it - and finally
a few turns caught and I was good. I tightened it and the other bolt
across from it as tight as I dared. Did I mention these bolts are
stainless?
I hate stainless bolts. They are soft. They break. How many of you have
twisted off one of the u-bolts on your Hy-Gain/CDE rotators over the
years? They are just waiting to break. You have to be careful.
Choking up on the wrench paying close attention to any hint it is no
longer moving the nut but stating to twist the bolt in half. But I
digress.
I did not twist the head off or strip the bolt or hole out.
Later I noticed that I am not the only person who has had this
trouble.
How do I know this?
M2 sells a bolt kit for this rotator. That has drilled bolt heads and
comes with the wire to wire them together so they do not come out. I
wonder if they ship this with new rotors now or just let you have them
all fall out before selling you this option?
https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/msq-safetywirekt
I guess there are are hundreds of hams around the world with some
3/8-24 3/4" bolts within 10-15 feet of their tower bases.
I got back in the shack about 4 minutes before the contest and got on
the air.
I turned that rotator a lot this weekend.
The contest:
I was torn between doing an assisted effort vs unassisted - there are
pros and cons for both but in the end with the expected conditions I
decided that I would use the DX spots - and get in some DXing - as a
way to keep me going if conditions were as poor as some of my friends
were predicting. In the end I am glad I did go assisted - it would
have been much more work with out a few hundred of my friends telling
me where the stations were and what their callsigns are.
I have often found that disturbed conditions can be one way to
equalize or neutralize the advantage of being at a QTH that is further
north and east of Texas. Over the years from a placement perspective
it has seemed to help me/us finish higher than those stations that are
to the North east of Texas. Maybe it is just because folks don't get
on or give up. I had the top USA score in the assisted category a few
years ago when the A/K were high. I think I even outscored several of
the M/2 entries by a good margin that year - but I had propagation to
EU and JA - when those to the north did not. This weekend not so
much.
Based on the online score board I clearly had a better first 24 hours
than the folks northeast of here - but most of them made it all back
by Sunday morning. 15 meters just did not open up on Sunday morning
the way it sounded like it would - and short path to JA did not open
up either on Sunday afternoon. I had worked a few of the big gun JA
stations on scatter to the SW on Saturday afternoon/night on 15
meters. And I worked a few more Sunday but they were just as weak as
they were the day before.
Forty meters was OK to JA on Saturday but Sunday did not seem much
better or maybe they all had given up on the contest by Sunday.
I heard 9V1YC for a few hours on 40 but they could not hear me - and at
the end on 20 meters I could just barely hear James but again no QSO was
possible. We need a few more sunspots.
There were several other BY and SE Asian stations on 40 meters with in
some cases great signals that just can not hear. I am sure they live in
RFI hell in many cases. Not a great trend.
I had a good time. It was rough going a few times but I still fun.
Great to work all of you from the various places.
BAND Raw QSOs Valid QSOs Points Countries Zones
___________________________________________________________
160SSB 46 46 100 29 14
80SSB 132 131 319 72 24
40SSB 788 776 1494 102 31
20SSB 716 707 1379 108 32
15SSB 425 423 938 89 26
10SSB 122 119 326 28 12
___________________________________________________________
Totals 2229 2202 4556 428 139
Final Score = 2583252 points.
160 80 40 20 15 10 ALL
--- -- -- -- -- -- ---
USA calls = 2 7 233 204 84 7 537
VE calls = 13 23 72 74 34 0 216
N.A. calls = 19 30 63 56 46 10 224
S.A. calls = 8 16 54 76 124 97 375
Euro calls = 0 39 79 190 96 0 404
Afrc calls = 2 6 22 13 19 1 63
Asia calls = 0 1 8 6 1 0 16
JA calls = 0 3 162 73 3 0 241
Ocen calls = 2 6 83 15 16 4 126
Total calls = 46 131 776 707 423 119 2202
HR 160 80 40 20 15 10 HR TOT CUM TOTAL SCORE
-- ----- ------- -------- -------- -------- -------- ------ --------- -----
0 --- --- 32/36 39/30 14/13 --- 85/79 85/79 0.02M
1 --- 20/27 28/23 2/1 --- --- 50/51 135/130 0.05M
2 13/18 18/17 39/12 --- --- --- 70/47 205/177 0.09M
3 2/0 14/11 57/13 --- --- --- 73/24 278/201 0.13M
4 4/3 9/10 50/5 --- --- --- 63/18 341/219 0.16M
5 7/7 12/5 21/2 --- --- --- 40/14 381/233 0.18M
6 5/6 6/7 21/9 --- --- --- 32/22 413/255 0.22M
7 2/1 6/2 82/4 --- --- --- 90/7 503/262 0.28M
8 --- 2/0 74/4 --- --- --- 76/4 579/266 0.33M
9 1/0 5/7 46/2 1/0 --- --- 53/9 632/275 0.38M
10 1/1 1/0 18/1 --- --- --- 20/2 652/277 0.39M
11 --- 4/1 6/1 --- --- --- 10/2 662/279 0.41M
12 --- 1/2 11/2 11/14 --- --- 23/18 685/297 0.45M
13 --- --- --- 32/19 19/19 --- 51/38 736/335 0.55M
14 --- --- --- 46/14 1/0 --- 47/14 783/349 0.62M
15 --- --- --- 2/1 25/24 6/11 33/36 816/385 0.71M
16 --- --- --- 8/10 23/9 14/7 45/26 861/411 0.81M
17 --- --- --- 7/8 7/6 3/4 17/18 878/429 0.87M
18 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 878/429 0.87M
19 --- --- --- 81/12 24/6 4/3 109/21 987/450 0.98M
20 --- --- --- 17/0 34/2 7/5 58/7 1045/457 1.06M
21 --- --- --- 3/4 7/0 64/3 74/7 1119/464 1.18M
22 --- --- 19/7 56/2 1/1 2/0 78/10 1197/474 1.28M
23 --- --- 9/2 45/1 4/2 --- 58/5 1255/479 1.35M
0 --- --- 7/1 35/5 --- --- 42/6 1297/485 1.41M
1 --- 6/1 61/0 --- --- --- 67/1 1364/486 1.44M
2 --- 5/1 23/1 --- --- --- 28/2 1392/488 1.47M
3 --- 1/2 21/1 --- --- --- 22/3 1414/491 1.50M
4 4/4 9/1 14/1 --- --- --- 27/6 1441/497 1.55M
5 1/0 6/0 1/0 --- --- --- 8/0 1449/497 1.55M
6 1/2 --- 21/0 --- --- --- 22/2 1471/499 1.57M
7 1/0 1/0 18/0 --- --- --- 20/0 1491/499 1.59M
8 --- --- 29/1 --- --- --- 29/1 1520/500 1.62M
9 --- 1/0 25/0 --- --- --- 26/0 1546/500 1.65M
10 3/1 2/0 6/0 --- --- --- 11/1 1557/501 1.67M
11 1/0 1/2 30/1 --- --- --- 32/3 1589/504 1.71M
12 --- 1/0 5/2 14/1 --- --- 20/3 1609/507 1.75M
13 --- --- --- 23/5 4/0 --- 27/5 1636/512 1.81M
14 --- --- --- 39/1 6/5 1/1 46/7 1682/519 1.87M
15 --- --- --- 22/1 58/17 5/1 85/19 1767/538 2.05M
16 --- --- --- 30/1 11/0 --- 41/1 1808/539 2.11M
17 --- --- --- --- 55/5 9/3 64/8 1872/547 2.20M
18 --- --- --- 21/2 29/0 1/1 51/3 1923/550 2.26M
19 --- --- --- 20/0 47/4 --- 67/4 1990/554 2.33M
20 --- --- --- 18/1 48/2 --- 66/3 2056/557 2.41M
21 --- --- --- 64/0 1/0 --- 65/0 2121/557 2.46M
22 --- --- --- 23/3 5/0 3/1 31/4 2152/561 2.52M
23 --- --- 2/2 48/4 --- --- 50/6 2202/567 2.58M
D1 35/36 98/89 513/123 350/116 159/82 100/33 1255/479
D2 11/7 33/7 263/10 357/24 264/33 19/7 947/88
TO 46/43 131/96 776/133 707/140 423/115 119/40 2202/567
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