[NCC] OQP N2CU/M

[Tom Williams]

Well, that was special.

 

My daughter got married yesterday :-) so I was felling a little bit under
the weather today :-(

 

The tux rental place didn't open until 10 AM so had to wait until then to
return it. Thoughts of OQP mobile were going through my head but I'd be late
for the start. We're not doing anything but relaxing today so the wife says
"go ahead and do your contest". I pack up the car and drive to Ohio. Pull
off at the visitor center at 17:29 and check 10m - nothing. Check 15m -
nothing. Check 20m - a couple of signals. Gonna be one of those days. Start
CQ'ing on 14044.3 from Ashtabula and after working five stations I get run
off frequency by another Ohioan. Move to 14046.5 and try again. This time I
work 15 stations before being run off. S&P a couple of stations and then QSY
to 40m. S&P a dozen stations and then decide to run. Log 11 stations and
then notice the SWR is going all over the place. When I put the K3 in TUNE
mode (5W) the SWR looked good and was fairly stable. Crank the power up to
100W and the SWR went berserk. Power folded back to about 30W. Tried
switching bands and still saw the same behavior. Time to pack it in.

 

So the net result was 45 QSOs and 30 mults in 1 hour for 2700 points.
Calculated efficiency is 0.19 QSOs per mile traveled.

 

BTW, I don't understand why stations found it so unusual that a "2" was
mobile in Ohio. A lot of repeats and I had to add OHIO after sending ASHT.

 

 

73,

Tom N2CU <><

K3 #3582