[Fourlanders] EME Contest Summary from W4ZST

[Bob Lear]

A fantastic contest!   Lots of Q's on all three bands!  Jerry even came 
up and smoked us a brisket!!  Sorry you all missed out!!

Actually, conditions were not so good with a very high degradation 
number.  Most stations were complaining on the chat pages about the 
signal loss and inability to complete QSO's.  We had the same problems here.
Brian NX9O and I were on from the contest start Friday night.  He left 
Sunday afternoon and I did the last two hours of the contest on Sunday 
night from my  MR until the end at 7PM and made 2 Q's on each band 
before the contest ended.
I operated 2m and Brian 432 and checked on 222 when he had a chance.  No 
Q's this weekend on 222.  There was one possible and he tried but didn't 
make it.

So with only the one Q I made the first weekend on 222, we ended up with 
26 Q's on 2m, 14 Q's on 432 and the one on 222.  I'll enter as 
multi-band, multi-op but I'm sure we are way out of the money.  EU 
stations seemed to be doing much better among themselves.
I did end up with some new grids and new countries and the highlight for 
me was getting Hawaii on 2m.  That's pretty rare.

Anyway, we had a good time for most of it but since it was in the wee 
hours both nights, by about 1:30 AM on Saturday night we just had to go 
in and sleep.  Don't know what we might have missed.  I did get up 
Sunday morning about 4:30 and got an hour and a half in before MS and 
made a couple of Q's on each band before going back in for more 
shut-eye.  Conditions made decoding tough even though we were seeing 
decent traces.  That was not so much fun.

Though we were thinking about Jerry's brisket, we only had stromboli's 
from Johnny's Pizza on Friday night and Judy made us Brunswick Stew and 
Cornbread for Saturday night.  We also had some hot cinnamon apples with 
Ice cream from our Yates apple tree here beside the 432 antennas!

It was good to get back on EME after missing the 2019 contest weekends 
and not being able to get on 2 or 432 for the first weekend of this 
years contest.  This time there were no problems with the stations or 
antennas.  Good tracking all night both nights without having to make 
any adjustments.  We just always could see the sigs off the moon on both 
bands.

All three stations set up the same.  Flex 1500's for IF rigs, DEMI 
transverters, Lunar Link amps and DEMI preamps.   We run both WSJT 10 
for RX and TX and WSJT-x for additional RX capability.  All three sets 
of antennas are Horizontal or Vertical polarization and full Az-EL.  On 
2m are two M-squared XP20's, on 222 are two M-squared XP30's and on 432 
I have two K1FO-25's with Horizontal Polarization on top of the H-frame 
and two more K1FO-25's with Vertical Polarization on the bottom.  All 
the antennas played well with no problems.  All tracking with Yaesu 
G5500 rotators, LVB tracker interfaces and MoonSked for rotator 
control.  Pictures and descriptions of the stations and antennas are now 
on my W4ZST QRZ.com web page.  I finally got around to doing that recently.

73, Bob