[CQ-Contest] June VHF contest

[Jim Brown]

On Mon,5/11/2015 10:12 AM, Gerry Treas K8GT wrote:
> And I got VUCC on 6 two years ago.  Lots of fun. 

Yes, LOTS of fun, especially during the summer months when E-skip is at 
its peak. Going from memory, I think you and I have worked on 6M. I'm 
running a K3/P3/KPA500, and work CW, SSB, JT65, JT9, FSK441 (for meteor 
scatter), and ISCAT (good for tropo). My antenna is the original 3-el 
SteppIR with the 4th fixed director. From my QTH 70 miles S of San 
Francisco, I have 15 countries, 45 states, and 325 grids confirmed on 
6M. Before I had the SteppIR and KPA500, I made a dozen or so double hop 
E-skip QSOs to the east coast and KH6 with 100W into an 80/40 fan 
dipole. When I was still in Chicago, I remember working a guy on Long 
Island loading a wire in his basement!

VHF contest weekends are a great time to pick up new grids because so 
many stations are active. I set my P3 to monitor 50.080 MHz to 50.280 
MHz, and have WSJT-X running on 50.276 for JT65 and JT9. With this 
setup, I can see the CW segment (50.080 - 50.1), the Atlantic DX window 
(50.1 - 50.125), the calling frequency (50.125), SSB activity (50.125 - 
50.240), and JT65/JT9. During a brief trans-equatorial opening last 
fall, I made five Qs to three adjacent grids in PY and CX in about a 
half hour. Three were JT65, two were CW, and I saw the guys on CW 
because of that P3 monitoring setup.

73, Jim K9YC