[Fourlanders] Contest Summary

[w4zst at windstream.net]

Well, the gods of propagation did not come to visit for this contest.  I don't have all the old records, but this has got to be an all time low score for us.

Band   Q     grids
6m     64     33
2m     48     20
222    12      9
432    20     10
         144    72    12,672 points total

And of course, that made it pretty boring to be sitting at the radio and just calling CQ to the empty airwaves.  I'm sure the NFL playoff games didn't help either.

We managed to make up for some of it with good food and drink.  Jerry brought one of his most excellent briskets, beans, and mexican cornbread, that along with my large batch of slaw, pretty much all disappeared Saturday night.  Many thanks to Jerry for providing this great meal for all of us.  Some of the folks met at Johnny B's for Saturday lunch and some met at Roosters.  I cooked Pancakes and sausage for breakfast on Sunday morning and we had sandwiches and chips for lunch on Sunday.  A lot of ops left early since there was so little activity and I decided to not cook the spaghetti for Sunday dinner.  Instead, those of us left feasted on the Johnny B's Pizza that was here for snacking and had not yet been devoured.  Thanks for the Pizza Scott!  Those of us who were here Friday night had gone to 'Don Pollo' Restaurant in town for an excellent meal and then had sausage biscuits for breakfast on Saturday morning.  Once again, no one went hungry or lost any weight.

Operators were Kim WG8S, Jim W4KXY, Ivan K4VJM, Kos N4NIA, Jerry W5TDY, Jack K5FSE, Bill KI4US, Johnny K4SQC, Scott NN4W, Ron WW8RR and Bob W4ZST. We had quite a few visitors who stopped by various times on Saturday and Sunday:  Rick KK4LPP, Randy KK4ONJ, Joe KJ4JBG, Rob WB4GKI and grandson Devon KJ4RYZ, Mike KF4ZFP and Murray KD4MDH, all from the NGARC club in Dahlonega and visiting Fourlanders Dusty NR4N, Chris W4ONT and Tom W4SDR and daughter Audrey.

Brian NX9O had planned to be with us for the contest, but youngest daughter Eilis was injured at school on Thursday, had surgery, spent the night in the hospital and was home being taken care of by Brian on Friday.  We all wish the speediest recovery for Eilis.

Johnny K4SQC was going to be the back-up 6m band captain for the contest as originally planned but with Brian's absence, he once again did journeyman duty on the 222 station (and may have been bored more than the rest of us!)  He did get relief from other ops and spent some constructive time working on the Writelog/audio problems.  He had brought his contesting computer with dual boot W7/XP and also had WL 11.11 and 11.14.  He has even done more testing since getting back home with his gear.  We will have a separate discussion about our findings on these problems and what we have come up with for proposed solutions.

We also had some audio problems, mostly sound card related that we can't explain along with some WL problems right at start time.  We had had all the computers on since Friday afternoon, set up and working just fine Friday night and Saturday morning and then about 10 minutes before contest kick-off, none of them wanted to work properly with WriteLog.  We finally got it all straightened out, but not quite sure what happened.  We were late getting some bands on at the beginning of the contest, but the poor propagation pretty much made that a non-issue also.

Several items of note for the contest:  Jack K5FSE had offered use of his new W6PQL solid state 2m amplifier for the contest.  We didn't have any problems with it or the power supply I had put together for it.  It worked just fine and Jack operated 2m quite a bit.  Just wish we'd had some propagation to see what it would do!!  We also had the 2 beams on the BlackHawk tower trailer which put them a good bit higher than we usually have them, and the new 2m omni beam array was on the air, but unfortunately neither got much of a test this time to see what kind of improvements they could make.

Other problems we had were a water logged N-connector on 432 which we pin-pointed with Kim's AIM UHF analyzer.  Thanks to Kim for sending it to me before the contest to check all the antenna installations.  It's getting to be that we can't do without that analyzer and it's TDR function nowadays. Unfortunately for me, he took it home after the contest!  The other problem was with an Alpha-Delta antenna switch on 2m.  This is probably the third one of those we've had trouble with.  There was much discussion about what to use for antenna (beam/omni) switching in the future.

The weather was pretty cool, but the days were beautiful outside, we kept the big garage door open most of the time and didn't have any rain.  

One final item:  We probably had the most WSJT success ever for a contest.  Both 6m and 2m were working fine and making quite a number of Q's.  I think I heard that we made all the skeds and some randoms.

Folks kept leaving early on Sunday since so little was going on and by Sunday night only Ron, Kos, Ivan and myself were left, so we decided to quit at  8:30.  Kos packed up the 2m station, Ron took his computer to be able to continue testing at home on the WL/audio problems, and by 9PM we turned off the lights and went home.  I don't think we could have missed much!

Thanks to all who participated and visited with us.  Just wish we had more activity for the new folks to see what goes on during a contest, beside the complaining!!

Waiting for June, 73, Bob