[Fourlanders] My contest recap

Tue Jun 23 09:51:44 EDT 2020

Every year the June VHF contest brings something different. One thing that
seems constant: I can never operate to the very end of the contest for one
reason or another.

Last year I did not operate at all due to family commitments and traveling.
2018 I operated the contest from the Dry Tortugas and rare grid EL84. 2017
from Wayah Bald, NC. And the previous 2 years from Blood mountain north of
Helen, GA. This year I picked Rabun Bald, the 2nd highest peak in Georgia
at 4700 feet. It is in the extreme NE part of Georgia, 8 miles NE of
Clayton, GA and only 2 miles from the North Carolina boarder to the north,
grid square EM84. Being off the Bartram trail, it does get some traffic,
mostly from day hikers but nowhere near the amount of traffic as the
Appalachian Trail like Blood Mountain.

New this year was a 25 watt Alinco radio for the 220 band. Previously I had
a Baofeng 5w 220 radio that worked ok. The other radio is my Yaesu ft-8900
that I have been using for years for 6m, 2m, and 70cm. I operate in the FM
only category since it has less competition but comes with its own set of
challenges. For one, FM is terrible for weak signal work. Bands openings
happen less often, and when they do happen it has to be strong to work
people. FM also takes a lot more power for the same power output when
compared to SSB. Also finding an antenna for 6m FM is not easy. On the
positive side. Everyone has a radio that can do 2m FM. If you have a
license, your probably have an HT that does 2m FM so there is a large pool
of people to potentially make contacts with.

For antennas, 2m/70cm is provided by an Elk log periodic. This is a
lightweight backpackable antenna that I mount on the very top of my push up
pole. It might not be the best antenna but under a pound it gets the job
done. For 220 I have a 6 element Yagi, kind of heavy and bulky. I may look
to replace this next year with something lighter. 6m is a modified Par
electronics Moxon. All of this is mounted on a 21-foot aluminum push-up
pole.

For batteries I had a 40ah Bioenno, 15ah Bioenno, and a 9ah Bioenno
battery. My calculations pre-contest showed that I should not use more than
2ah per hour of operating @ 25 hours I would need 50ah of battery. I also
wanted to have a cushion since that was my limiting factor 2 different
years where I ran out of power ending the contest early for me. Another
year a thunderstorm ended the contest early for me. People have asked me
about solar power, and I considered it but the complication, hassle, and
weight of it outweighed just bringing more battery.

This year I am thankful to have my son to carry the food and water. Also,
David KN4ZKT helped carry some things up so my load was much lighter this
year than in the past! The trip to the top was shorter and less elevation
gain than when I used to do Blood Mountain.

We arrived on the summit Friday evening and setup camp. I did make a couple
of contacts to other SOTA activators and counted them as Summit 2 Summit
contacts since Rabun Bald is considered a Summits On The Air summit:
W4G/NG-002. Other than that, I kept the radios off to conserve power.

The next morning, I made more S2S contacts before the contest. Everything
was working great. Even before the contest there was a LOT of activity on
the 2m calling frequency with sometimes as many as 4 different groups
trying to all talk at once. I figured I would try and stay off 146.52 as
much as possible because it was only going to get worse. As in the past it
was crazy for the first few hours of the contest, my very first contact was
on 220 to KC4WZB on another summit. We then worked the other 3 bands. That
is how I tried to run all my contacts: work them on the initial band then
find out what other bands they had I could work them on. This worked well
when the initial contact was on something other than 2m, then I could go to
one of the adjacent 2m simplex frequencies (146.49 or 146.55) but there
were times when there were people on all 3! The advantage of being up so
high, you can hear everyone, and everyone can hear you, but they can’t
necessarily hear the other parties talking. So, you sometimes have to play
net control.

I had kept hearing that 6m was open to the NE but it was never strong
enough for FM use. I knew something was up because the noise level was very
high on 6m but could not hear anything but static. In previous years I have
always had a 6m opening for FM and some Tropo ducting on 2m FM… this year
no such luck except for the almost contact with a VA3 station in FN14. The
opening didn’t last long enough for us to exchange the info! That was a
real bummer and would have really made my weekend.

Sunday morning, David hiked up and joined us to work some SSB and had a
blast on 6m and 2m with contacts from FL to New England… I was kind of
jealous of the contacts he was getting with only 5 watts! But that is the
tradeoff running FM. By late morning we started to hear about bad storms
heading our way. Like I said, I have never been able to stay until the end
of the contest. We made the decision to pack up around 1pm and I think we
were hiking by 2:30pm. The whole way down the mountain we were hearing
thunder getting closer. That is one thing I don’t mess with is being on a
mountain top with a bunch of metal sticking up in the air during a
thunderstorm!

I had no real equipment issues. Only used 26.31ah of battery out of my 40ah
battery, this was also leaving the Yaesu radio on all night to monitor
while I slept. Never used the 15ah battery and used a small amount from the
9ah battery to charge my phone. Maybe next year I will leave the 15ah
battery at home.

I ended up with 193 contacts across the 4 bands (after eliminating dups).
28 on 6 meters from 6 different grids, 99 on 2m from 11 different grids, 43
on 70cm from 7 different grids, and 23 on 220 from 3 different grids –
which is the best I have ever done on that band. I was hoping to break 200
and I would have easily done that if it wasn’t for the storm. I did end up
with 21 Summit-to-Summit contacts for SOTA during the weekend, so that was
fun.

Next year I will try it again from the same summit and see how I can
streamline my setup even further. There has also been some talk of doing a
group camp up there with multiple operators in September. If we do that, we
will have to work out how not to interfere with each other.

Here is a link to some of the photos and video I took:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/VDf4KCGm9g1aHinR8

Ryan

WG4I
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.contesting.com/pipermail/fourlanders/attachments/20200623/b51bfb20/attachment-0001.html>