[Fourlanders] My contest recap

Tue Jun 23 14:03:36 EDT 2020

Hey Tom,How come only Audrey turned in a contest log ?Didn't the rest of family make any contacts ?RonSent from my Samsung S4

-------- Original message --------
From: Tom McElroy <tommcelroy.mail at gmail.com> 
Date: 06/23/2020  11:44 AM  (GMT-05:00) 
To: Ryan Kovacs <tukosei at gmail.com> 
Cc: FourLanders Contest Team <fourlanders at contesting.com> 
Subject: Re: [Fourlanders] My contest recap 

Nice work, old man!!!We’d love to join you up there in the cool air. 73Tom and Ham Clan McElroyOn 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
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