[NCC] K8NZ adventures in 160m Land

[Nzharps at aol.com]

Hola NCC,

Just back from my 160m adventures in NJ..whew it's a different world over 
there.  Descriptions of the new location by GD were not exaggerated..the 
place really works.  

The new W2GD site is located just west of Tuckerton which is 80 miles south 
of the previous Sandy Hook site.  The place is a former ship-to-shore 
transmitter site with a 300 ft. tower.  Most of the place is salt marsh that 
was thankfully frozen while I was there.  The guys said between the mud and 
bugs, it is a hell hole to work in.

In spite of all the hardships, they have built a new xmit array (from the 
180ft point on the tower) and erected six beverages for all the important 
directions.  The xmit array is a single loop that is broadside NE/SW and acts 
as a reflector for two pulled back dipoles (one NE, the other SW).  The array 
can be switched between NE, SW and "omni"..it is a killer to EU.  They also 
have erected an inverted-L to use on the second radio.

Inside the shack the main radio was a 756PROII/Alpha with a slaved IC765 to 
listen on the xmit QRG.  A second rig (IC781/Alpha) was used with an xmit 
lockout to hunt for mults and additional Q's.  All three radios have the 
ability to listen to any of the six beverages at any time via a "magic" box 
made by W2NO (he's their tech guy and resident comedian). We had a crew of 8 
so all three chairs were filled for the entire time we were on the air.

CONDX were only so-so on Friday nite, but rates were good with the first two 
hours over 100.  We ended the first nite with 140 or so 10 point Q's.  I was 
impressed..all the W2's yawned.  We didn't operate all day (to protest the 
new time format), but were back on at 20z.  Immediately things were better as 
we were hearing EU before 3:30 local.  EU called in all nite on Saturday 
until their sunrise along with other goodies like S9, A92, etc. 

The most fun of the nite was "triple teaming" the xmit QRG for about 2hours 
trying to eeeek out every EU calling.  2GD was on the main station, I was on 
the slave RX and Danny, W2NO was on the 2nd station.  We were all trying to 
pull out letters from some of the really weak ones and there were some 
"whisper" Q's.  It was intense and it was a riot all at the same time.  We 
ended up the second nite with an additional 200 EU QSO's.

I headed back to Ohio after the Sunday morning shut-down at 9am.  The rest of 
the crew did get back on again from 3pm to the finish and worked a few new 
mults and more 10 pointers.  The final total appears to be 1314 QSO  71 C   
55 S   683,802 pts.  in 36 hours.  Looks like we will be #2 behind KC1XX by 
about 25K points.  

73, 
Ron, K8NZ