[CQ-Contest] ARRL SSB DX Contest 1999 - The Cuba Libre story

[John Downing]

Hi all,

This is probably much too long but it's been sitting here on my computer
partly done for days.  I guess I just got carried away!  Hope you find
this entertaining reading.

Here's a write-up of the Cuba Libre Contest Club's trip to V31 and our
Multi-Single effort in the ARRL DX Contest:

Wednesday before the contest:  

Out of the sack at 4:00 am to get this expedition going!  By 5:15 am Vic
KI6IM, Peter AB6WM, and Tom KM6K were all rounded up and we were off to
the San Diego airport.  With some trepidation we checked our six cases
of ham gear through to Belize on Continental via Houston connecting to
Groupo Taca Airlines.  Houston would be a great place to have our stuff
routed incorrectly especially with an international connection.  We
placed our fate in the hands of the baggage handlers and checked in.  As
in the past we used both Sea King Tundra and Pelikan instrument/camera
cases.  These are fantastic for DX-peditions and I recommend them
without reservation.  You can find them on the web with any search
engine.  After lunch during our short layover in Houston we boarded the
Taca flight to Belize.  The gate agent was able to verify that all of
and on the aircraft - ain't technology wonderful!  Upon arrival in
Belize we were greeted by our old friend and Taca agent, Angel Alpuche,
who helped us through customs.  With all of our gear present and
accounted for we hopped on the Tropic Air Cessna Caravan turboprop for
the 15 minute flight to San Pedro, Ambergris Caye.  Ambergris Caye is
the northernmost of a chain of barrier reef islands that lie about 20
miles off the coast of Belize.  It's the home of the Belize Yacht Club
and several other resorts that cater primarily to scuba divers.  San
Pedro, the island's village of 4000 or so, even boasts a hyperbaric
chamber!  Scuba is very big in these parts.  We arrived just before
sunset and had just enough time to check out the tower (looked just
fine), the Yacht Club (never looked better), and order up a few Cuba
Libres from the yacht club bar!  After traveling all day, toasting the
sunset with a few good friends was the perfect end to a long day.

Thursday before the contest:

Eager to get going early in the morning to avoid the tropical mid-day
heat, we were greeted by - rain!  Luckily by mid-morning the rain
showers had stopped so we could get to work on our antennas.  We
replaced the crank-up tower cable, an element tip on our 40 meter beam,
and the coax to our tower mounted antennas.  Peter got to work making
our 80 meter wire vertical and 160 meter inverted L.  Late that
afternoon we found that the gamma match on our TH-7 had corroded so
badly that the feed line was no longer attached to the rear driven
element!  A pair of large alligator clips fixed the problem for the
weekend.  This fix wasn't complete until Friday so our tower stayed down
all day.  

Friday before the contest:

On Friday morning Vic once again climbed the tower and applied the
alligator clip feed.  We untangled coax and Peter's wire antennas and,
for the fourth time, raised our hand crank powered 70 foot tower.  We
now know that it takes 500 turns of the crank to raise the tower!  With
the TH-7 and Cushcraft 40 meter beam checked out we turned our attention
to our 80 and 160 meter wire antennas.  Both were pretty rude and crude
affairs.  They were suspended from a standoff mounted near the top of
the tower.  The 80 meter vertical was simply a dipole with one leg hung
from the tower. The "radial" was the other leg which we ran along a
nearby concrete wall.  The 160 meter inverted L had it's "radial" run
along the same wall and the other leg alongside the tower and then to a
nearby rooftop.  They resonated where we expected but we had no idea if
they would work at all!  We would find out the first evening of the
contest and make any fixes on Saturday.  The rest of the afternoon was
spent connecting up our FT1000mp and Quadra amp, networking the laptops,
trying to get RecordALL to work on one of the spare laptops so we could
record the entire contest, and just basically hanging out in the
Tropics.

Let the Games Begin:

After a refreshing dip in the pool it was time to get busy with the
contest.  At 23:55 I did a quick scan of 10 meters, found a few signals
and decided to start the contest on 28.490.  At 00:00 I started CQing to
absolutely no response!  Oh no, this was already looking like it was
gonna be a long 48 hours.  10 meters had completely folded up! After two
minutes of silence I dropped down to 15 and found a clear spot for a
CQ.  At 00:02 N2MUN found his way into the log and we were off to the
races.  Things started to settle into the normal contest routine with
240 in the log for the first hour and 700 in the first three hours.  15
folded up early; I had to drop to 20 during the first hour.  At 03:00 we
went to 160 for a peek and, despite S9+20 atmospheric static crashes put
32 in the log with a valuable 15 multipliers.  We bounced back and forth
between 160, 80, and 40 for the next 8 hours until the east coast woke
up (we could practically smell the coffee!) and we moved up the bands
ending up on 10 at 13:30.  The remainder of the day (zulu time) was
spent with some great runs on 10 and 15 with a 308 hour at 19:00 on 15
meters.  After the first day we were looking pretty sweet with no
equipment bothers and our makeshift antennas hitting on all eight
cylinders.  Here's a breakdown of our activity for the first day:

Band	QSOs	Multipliers	Hours	QSO rate/Hr

160	 118	33		1.7	 70
 80	 199	44		2.2	 92
 40	 472	54		3.8	124
 20	 986	57		4.8	204
 15	1202	59		4.8	248
 10	1530	58		6.3	243

Total	4507	305		23.6	191

Of course, we knew the second day would be slower; it always is.  The
key for us in this contest would be to build the 160 multiplier count
and to hope 10 would be open and active to build our QSO count.  We knew
our 160/80 wire antennas were working great although receiving was a
problem with lots of QRN.  The QRN level decreased every night from S9+
down to S5 so we hoped the late night contingent on 160 and 80 stayed up
until the early morning hours!  The wee hours of Sunday morning are
always a slow time and this contest was no exception;  We logged only
400 QSOs between 06:00 and 12:00 with our worst hour of 32 QSOs at
11:00z.  We never could seem to get much going on 80.  We tried simplex
operation at the high end of the DX window and just below the window. 
We tried split operation from below the US section listening above
3800.  Never could get any good rates on this band.  By 14:00 we were
back on 10 meters again and stayed there most of the afternoon (with
occasional excursions to 15 and 20 when the well ran dry) until 23:00
when it folded up.  Here's a breakdown of our second day activity:

Band	QSOs	Multipliers	Hours	QSO rate/Hr

160	 171	14		2.4	 72
 80	 186	11		2.6	 72
 40	 533	 5		4.3	123
 20	 475	 1		3.2	149
 15	 818	 0		4.5	181
 10	1453	 1		6.7	216

Total	3636	32		23.7	153

At 23:59 with the "last 10 rate" at 610 (!) we pulled the plug and
called it a day.  Forty-five minutes later we had all the equipment
packed, the tower cranked down, and the coax stowed away.  Then off to
the Jade Garden, our favorite Belizian Chinese restaurant for the
victory/war stories dinner.  Monday morning we retraced our airline
steps back to San Diego and were home that afternoon.

A few Post Contest Notes:
 
Our overall QSO rate for the contest was 172, probably our best to
date.  Our best minute was 9 per minute, our best 10 minutes was 74, and
our best 60 minutes was 329.  If you include our 227 logged Dupes our
rate goes to 174 for the contest.  

We used just a single FT1000mp and Quadra amp for this contest.  No
other radios were used although we had a spare TS-850.  We set the power
output of the FT1000mp to not exceed 50 watts and ran the Quadra in low
power mode.  The Quadra produced 700 watts peak and about 500 watts
average in this mode.  I had never used the Quadra until this contest
and had purchased it just before leaving with only enough time to do the
10 meter mod and test it into a dummy load.  This is one terrific
contesting amplifier.  It ran without a hitch all contest.  The
automatic antenna tuner worked quickly and reliably.  The automatic
antenna selector (mapped from the front panel) did it's job and
prevented us from attempting to load the tribander on 160 as we usually
do sometime during one of these contests.  In fact, we never had to
throw a coax switch or unscrew a coax connector during the entire
contest.  It ran very cool.  In fact, except for the fan noise you would
never know it's on.  And finally, the good engineers at Yaesu made the
power supply adapt to the local line voltage - no 110/220 switch to
screw up - and best of all - it has a circuit breaker rather than
fuses.  Just the ticket when you're far from the nearest Radio Shack. 
Our attempt at recording the contest on a laptop came to naught when the
laptop comprehensively crashed several hours into the contest.  Oh well.

Thanks to all who stopped by to give us a QSO.  Congratulations to the
other Caribbean contest expeditions who all did so well.  And a special
congratulations to Dave Leeson at HC8L who put us all to shame with a
SOAB effort with over 8000 QSOs.  I don't know how those guys do it.

all for now,

John W2NA / V31DX
Vic KI6IM
Tom KM6K
Peter AB6WM

The Cuba Libre Contest Club


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