N6CQ COMMENTS/EXCUSES

[bill.lumnitzer at paonline.com]

                 CQ WORLD WIDE DX CONTEST - 1994
                      N6CQ Comments/Excuses

Managed to accomplish a lot of station improvements this year including
aãsecond tower, stack on 20, and wire beam and sloper on 80. Also rigged up a
remote switching system to allow selecting 40/20/XA with the flip (twist?) of a
switch for the run station. The mult rig automatically picks the right antenna
through a Top Ten Devices decoder. K3MQH brought along his nifty new I.C.E.
6-band BP filter box to use on the mult stn while the run stn used my set of
individual filters. Also installed a few coax stubs.  So far, so good, huh?
Wrong! Found myself still doing tower work at sunset Friday. Hooked up rigs and
tested computer network earlier using CT 9.13, but with an hour to go, we
discovered that the KT34-XA was stuck at North! I put on my climbing gear and
got ready to climb but after playing with the backstay of the 80m Yagi catenary
for half an hour, the XA broke loose.ãReady to roll! Wrong again! Severe
interference between run on 40m and multãon 20. Also found 80 screwed up both
40 and 20. Back to the drawing board! Struggle on - a wopping 200 Qs by
midnight! Thought we were all set with CT 9.13 after testing earlier, but no!
Recurring network crashes required frequent rebooting of one or both computers
so had to switch over to 8.49, which didn't seem to be affected as severely by
the rfi. RF also prevented the Mult stn '486 from keying the rig most of the
time and also took out the backup Autek keyer. Ferrite chokes and a new
keyboard didn't help. Second backup AEA keyer was put to good use (thanks
Dick!). Other highlights included replacing the 40m coax up the tower at 4am
Sunday, discovering that 20m signals were ALWAYS stronger on the KT34-XA than
on the stack, and freezing rain Sunday evening that caused 5:1 swr on the 80m
antennas.  After the contest I remembered that in hooking up the KLM-style feed
on theãlower 20, I had to guess which way the coax should go to match the upper
antenna, and I obviously guessed wrong... the stack now works fb with the
ãcorrect phasing! All in all it was fun, although my role was more
maintenanceãman than operator. Most of the local DX-cluster came out to operate
this year and did a great job in working around all the problems. K3MQH, WF3T,
and KQ3F deserve most of the credit for the score and really played their
hearts out. My goal is to get past having every contest seem like Field-Day! 
73 Bill, N6CQ/3 --- Blue Wave/QWK v2.10