[CQ-Contest] Don't give me any static

[Trey Garlough]

> BYW how can a KW be 30 over s9 but unable to hear me at all????  I
> should be 10 to 20 over with only 10 dB less signal.  I really like
> to know the straight skinny on this one, and it seemed to be
> everywhere.

> I checked the antenna this afternoon and all seems well.

Well, since you asked.  :-)

I just got back to Santa Cruz from 6D2X a few hours ago.  I did most
of my operating on 160 and 80 during our M/2 effort.  The 80/160
station was a TS-940S/Alpha 78 and inverted vees.  We also put up a
1/2-wave sloper for 80 to have a second antenna, which helped at
times.  We also had an NE beverage for RX.

The atmospheric noise at 6D2X on 80 and 160 was approximately S9+40
dB, with static crashes up in the 50+ over S9 range.  I spent most of
the weekend with 10 dB of attenuation clicked in, and the RF gain knob
set around 11 o'clock, so the S-meter would deflect down to about the
40 dB point on the S-meter during the 200 or so milliseconds out of
every second that the noise was not greater than S9+40.  We were
running about a KW out, so if we were 30 over S9 for you, and you were
running 10 dB less power, and signal strengths really are reflexive,
then you would have been S9+20, making you 20-30 dB below our noise
level.

The Gulf of Mexico is a noisy place, and this weekend it was
particularly noisy.  The most amazing thing to me was that there were
actually over 1000 guys on 80 this weekend that managed to put a S9+40
signal into Tamps this weekend.

Crew was K5TSQ, K5TR, W5VX, WB5UKU, N5KO, K1AR & K1DG.  AR and DG
stopped by on their way to the celluar show in San Francisco this
weeek.  I'm sure Geo or Ken will post actual numbers to 3830 in the
next day or so.  We would have reported them on 3830 kHz, but after
working flawlessly all weekend the power failed at the hotel about
eight minutes after the end of the contest, so we were blessed in this
respect.

--Trey, N5KO



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