It is nice to be assisted!

[Marijan Miletic]

I had a pleasure to visit Bernd, DF3CB beautyful station in downtown Munich on
Tuesday and I was delighted to verify that my SO CQ WW RTTY result was higher
than his SOA with similar equipment.  Being south, I had advantage of poor
condx and made more QSO and then we spoke about multipliers.  I said that
many zones were missing and he disagreed claiming a lot of rare ones I did NOT
work like SU, HS, JT.  I am convinced that my score would be better if I used
packet spoting as there was enough time to keep CQ-ing!  I guess interpolation
to other modes is permissible!?
73 de Mario, S56A, N1YU.

>From kurscj at oampc12.csg.mot.com (Chad Kurszewski WE9V)  Thu Oct  3 17:33:02 1996
From: kurscj at oampc12.csg.mot.com (Chad Kurszewski WE9V) (Chad Kurszewski WE9V)
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 1996 11:33:02 -0500
Subject: 80M short yagi's
Message-ID: <2.2.32.19961003163302.00682624 at oampc12.csg.mot.com>

>I'm looking for comments on KLM or M^2 yagi's.

I'm the main operator and gadget designer for KS9K.  We currently have
up a 2el homebrew copy of a KLM.  Saturday we are putting up a M^2 3el
in it's place.

The 2el has been up for approx 8 years, at 165'.


>How do they play at 110' The only reference I have
>now is the info in John Devoldere's book.
>
>Experience with:
>         height vs performance?

We also had a homebrew rotatable dipole (96' element!) at 115'.  The
reason it was up was because the 2el @ 165' only did SSB so the dipole
was tuned for CW.

The dipole SUCKED!!  BAD.  The mistuned (>3:1 SWR) beam heard better as
well as the "lazy V dipoles" we had up.  I can only attribute it's poor
performance (relative to the two other antenna choices) was due to a
higher angle of radiation from being lower on the tower.  I'm not sure
how it fared stateside, but the poor performance I'm speaking of is for
DX from the Midwest.

John, ON4UN, has told us repeatedly that our beam is TOO HIGH.  After
seeing the dipoles performance at 115', I don't think so.  Putting an
80M antenna at 110' is comparable to a 40M antenna at 55'.  (Yes, there
is a slight difference in the arrival angle between 40 and 80M, but the
comparison is close.)

Another thing to remember is that ON4UN has almost 100 countries
surrounding him.  A significant portion of his QSOs come from within
Europe.  A ton more come from the USA East Coast, which is still a fairly
high TOA.  Being in the Midwest or West, one needs a bit lower TOA to
get into EU or long haul JA.

Would you want to put your 40M beam at 55' or at 84'??  If you were working
stateside, you'd go with the 55', but DX would call for the 84'.


Hopefully in a few weeks, we'll be able to comment on the M^2 performance.

---
Chad Kurszewski, WE9V              e-mail:  Chad_Kurszewski at csg.mot.com
The Official "Sultans of Shwing" Web Site:  http://www.QTH.com/sos



>From readerl at goliath.sunyocc.edu (Larry Reader)  Thu Oct  3 20:58:57 1996
From: readerl at goliath.sunyocc.edu (Larry Reader) (Larry Reader)
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 96 15:58:57 -0400
Subject: WP2AHW - WAE SSB story (long)
Message-ID: <9610031958.AA16358 at goliath.sunyocc.edu>

I've written this for my club newsletter, thought it might amuse the reflector.

73

Larry
KE2VB

______________________________________________________________________________

"Why my wife thinks I'm nuts" by Larry Reader, KE2VB

An odd title to this month's column?  Read on and you'll
understand why my wife Bev feels that way.

I think I've mentioned in previous columns that my contest
station on St. Croix had sustained some damage from hurricane
Bertha.  The tower had folded, flipping the antenna and rotor
upside down.  After the hurricane Lorrin, the owner of Windwood,
(the house where the station is located) and I had decided that I
would come down to do the needed repair work in September.  Since
this was to be strictly a "work and contest trip" (I figured I
might as well do the WAE SSB while I was down) I didn't invite
Bev to come along.  After all, I figured, I wasn't going down for
a vacation!  She was not pleased.

I was supposed to leave for STX on Tuesday, September 10th, but
hurricane Hortense got in the way, in more ways than one, as I
later discovered.  I delayed my departure until Thursday to avoid
the storm.  Bev drove me to the airport early Thursday morning;
there wasn't a lot of conversation during the drive.  Got to the
airport, unloaded and had a skycap take my luggage to the ticket
counter.  He took off, I ran after him, Bev drove off, with my
tickets still on the back seat of the car!  The car phone was
turned off.  By the time Bev got home and I was able to speak
with her it just wasn't possible to drive back to the
airport before my flight took off.  The airline folks were more
than nice and rebooked me, after charging my credit card for
another $600.  Said I could get a refund when I brought back the
original tickets.  However, since I was flying on a free ticket,
my refund will be in the form of another free ticket!  Wonder if
Amex will except a free ticket as payment of my monthly bill,
probably not.

Got to San Juan around 2:30 pm.  No power in the airport, 90
degrees, 100% humidity, no power, no air conditioning.  Airport
is chaos, remember, PR had been declared a disaster area after
receiving 15 inches of rain from Hortense.  I finally got on a
plane to STX and arrived at 5:30 pm, Lorrin was there to meet me. 

No luggage.  No way to trace the luggage, no power at San Juan. 
So there I was, for two days, without clothes, tools, climbing
belt, repair parts, computer for the contest, etc.  They finally
found my luggage, sitting in San Juan, and got it to the St.
Croix airport on Friday evening.

All day Friday we worked to get the station operational.  I hate
working without proper tools.  Lorrin is 82 years old and the
tools he had, pliers, screwdriver, coping saw, etc. looked like
he had gotten them as Christmas presents when he was a child. 
With the help of the two guys Lorrin had hired to help me, we
managed to get the antenna down and the tower lowered.  The
antenna had taken much more of a beating than I had thought, it
was a total loss.  The rotor had been flipped upside down by
Bertha so the drain hole in the case was right side up.  15
inches of rain had poured in, it was junk too.  Managed to
convert the remains of the 40 ft tower to a reasonably stable 30
ft tower by remounting the thrust bearing and installing a new
rotor plate after discarding the top 10 ft of twisted aluminum. 
Remember now, I'm still in my "travel" clothes, not even a hat to
keep the sun off.  By the time we were done I was completely
soaked through with sweat.

At 5 pm we got the word my luggage had been found and was at the
airport.  We quickly erected Windwood's "backup" antennas, an A3
on a 10 ft mast and dipoles for 40 and 80 hung from the tower
(couldn't hang the A3 on the tower since, without a rotor, the
mast was unstable.  Doesn't matter anyway, antenna height is
irrelevant if you're already perched on the edge of a 900 ft
cliff).  Ran to the airport and retrieved the luggage, finally
changed.  Bought a pizza on the way back to sustain me through
the contest.  Set up the station and waited for the 8pm local
time contest start.  I was already completely beat.

The contest was a blast.  Windwood is very loud into EU, even
with just a dipole on 40.  80 was very noisy both nights, only
did about 50 contacts, 40 had the usual QRM, 20 was the "money"
band.  Had an opening on 15 on Sunday but not many EU stations
took advantage of it even though I begged all who called to put
me out on the EU DX Packetcluster.  Wound up with 900 Q's and
about 450,000 points which would have been 7th place in last
year's contest.  I was so exhausted from the repair effort that I
wound up only operating 24 of the allowed 36 contest hours. 
Couldn't go through the night either night which hurt my score on
80 and 40.  Boy I hate getting old.

The flight home the next day was easy compared to my flight down. 
The only snag was a 6 hour delay in Newark while Continental
waited for a line of thunderstorms to go through.  Got home just
after midnight.

Bev and I have since reached an understanding about this
obsession of mine to contest from the Caribbean.  She realizes
that I will continue to spend significant money and vacation time
to do it, I'm just addicted to high rates and working pileups. 
I've agreed that next year she can come along.  She has accepted
that I had been right, she certainly would not have had a good
time this year.  She believes, however, that none of these things
would have happened if she was with me, that fate was just
getting even with me for not inviting her down!

But, after we kissed and made up, she couldn't resist having the
last word.  And it was .... "This is what you do for fun?  You're
nuts".

P.S.  For those who asked, Windwood will be completly repaired in
time for the CQWW SSB.  A new Force 12 has been ordered and a T2X
is replacing the Yaesu G800S.  The CQWW SSB crew is bringing both
down and will install prior to the contest.