[Fourlanders] Bored in EN75

[Bob Mantell]

In the south end of EM74 it was a little better.
 
I had 80 Qs and 40 grids, all on 6M.  I have mostly been off the air the last two years with work and home remodeling.  The second part forced me to take down all my antennas other than the 10M yagi.  I put a small, 5 element, 12 foot boom 6M yagi up just in time for the 6M sprint a few weeks back.  I have a bigger one under construction now.
 
Most were made contacting those calling CQ, I spend little time calling.  I was cleaning the shack area during the slow times.  I was using the contest to test my new SB-200 amp conversion for 6M.  It had some minor issues I had to sort out the prior week.  More power did not totally solve the issue with me hearing folks that cannot hear me, but it helped alot.  I am getting a touch over 500 watts out with 70W drive from the FT-857d I was using.  The 857 does not stack up as well as the TS-2000, but my 2000 has suffered a power surge(it think) while I was away and is too flaky to use currently.
 
I plan to have a 2M station set up before CQ WW VHF in July.

 
73 de Bob,
 
W4GA  EM74qc
k4esa at yahoo.com
 

--- On Mon, 6/10/13, John Ackermann N8UR <jra at febo.com> wrote:


From: John Ackermann N8UR <jra at febo.com>
Subject: [Fourlanders] Bored in EN75
To: "'Fourlanders'" <fourlanders at contesting.com>
Date: Monday, June 10, 2013, 11:26 PM


Hi Guys --

Hope your propagation at W4NH was better than mine!  I heard you on 6M at the very beginning of the contest, but it almost sounded like m/s as I would hear only a couple of seconds at a time.  Later on Sunday we almost worked, but I couldn't get your grid so it's not in the log. Then finally I heard you calling CQ again at about 7:30PM but once more it was just for a few seconds.

In short, 6M just didn't happen this year.  I ended up with 49 QSOs and 31 grids, compared to 404 contacts and 138 grids last year.  I think 10 of the 49 were on CW as that was what it took to get through.

On the good news front, the new hardware worked really well.  I used one of the OpenHPSDR "Hermes" SDR boards with a 10W amplifier from Apache Labs in India.  That fed my new TE-0550G amplifier which put 350W into the 5 element C3i yagi at ~35 feet.  The GaSFET in the TE amplifier was really important with this hardware -- the Hermes receiver is excellent but has a pretty high noise figure on 6M.  The preamp seemed to have just about the right gain and NF.

I got an MFJ 75 amp switching power supply to drive the amplifier, and I'm not impressed.  The switching regulator actually "chattered" with modulation (i.e., you could hear my voice coming from the PS case), and there were quite a few wandering spurs on RX.  I wish there were another source for a switcher at that power level (a transformer supply was way too heavy to bring on this trip).

The PowerSDR software (same as Flex uses, but modified for this hardware) was running on a Core II laptop.  The spectrum display let me see 50.090 to 50.190 so I could quickly pounce whenever a signal showed up, which was very seldom.  Every now and then I had some electrical noise and the noise blanker *totally* knocked it out.  The K9DUR Voice Keyer software interfaces with PowerSDR using a "virtual audio cable" and I used that for the endless unanswered CQs I sent.

Anyway, it was still a blast despite the propagation.  We're up here until the end of June, and I will be on 6M and HF (100W to a vertical) when I have a chance.  I'll probably be on for Field Day as well.

73,
John
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