[CQ-Contest] An ounce of prevention...

[Jim Idelson]

While not everything was perfect for us during last weekends ARRL DX SSB 
Contest, one thing went extremely well. Here's the story...

We were a casual M/2 operation. On Sunday morning, I was operating 10m and W1VE 
was on the 15m station. We were running like crazy. Suddenly, there was a power 
glitch in the house. The Acom amps turned off. All the digital clocks in the 
house were blinking. The refrigerator went through its self-test sequence. 
Except for having to restart the Acom amps, the entire contest station - 
radios, computers, accessories - stayed on-the-air . We didn't miss a beat. 
Why? A few months ago, after some disastrous brushes with lightning, one of the 
protective measures I took was to buy a used 2kVA UPS on eBay. The unit powers 
EVERY 110vac device in my office/shack. The UPS sustained the power to 
everything through the glitch - eliminating what would have been, at a minimum, 
a costly 30+ minute recovery process to get all the computers, logs and radios 
back on-the-air. And, it could have been a lot worse than that! ["Excuse me, 
ZF2MM, we had a little power failure up here. May I please have my frequency 
back?"  I don't think so.]

Needless to say, I highly recommend a UPS for the well-prepared contester's 
shack!

73,

Jim Idelson K1IR
email    k1ir at designet.com
web    http://www.designet.com/k1ir