[Fourlanders] My contest recap

Tue Jun 23 11:52:31 EDT 2020

Great writeup Ryan, and awesome pics! I had fun up there, and hope we can
do it again soon!

-David

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 9:51 AM Ryan Kovacs <tukosei at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Fourlanders mailing list
> Fourlanders at contesting.com
> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/fourlanders
> Sent to: dave at highredline.com
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.contesting.com/pipermail/fourlanders/attachments/20200623/19600a3c/attachment-0001.html>