[SCCC] Go for the Gavel This Weekend

[Marty Woll]

This year, the ARRL UHF Contest will inaugurate a club competition, and a group of intrepid SoCal Contest Club members is determined to win this first one for our club.  Each of you who has any gear on 222 MHz or above can help the effort.  Here's how:

The contest runs from 11:00 a.m. PDT Saturday to 11:00 a.m. PDT Sunday.  In that 24 hours several rover stations will be covering a range from San Clemente at the southern end to Pahrump, NV in the north, operating from up to ten grid squares.  You can work them each time they move from one grid to another, and they'll be operating as they travel between stops.  If you just have FM on the higher bands, try 223.500 and 446.000 MHz.  The rovers will be in Orange County and the L. A. basin for about the first three hours of the contest.  They should be moving through the L. A. basin and the San Fernando Valley by around 2:00 p.m. and into the Antelope Valley by around 3:00 p.m.  Because their main activity is on SSB, all their antennas will be horizontally polarized, even for the enroute FM contacts.  Fold over that whip or tilt that beam to have the best shot at working them (although, if you catch them close to your location it probably won't matter).

In addition to working the rovers (eight callsigns), you can work one another.  Those with limited time to get on the air can maximixe contacts per hour in the chair by agreeing to get on every four hours (11:00, 3:00, 7:00, etc.) to look for other SCCC'ers for ten or fifteen minutes.  Just exchange grid squares, log it and prepare a Cabrillo file that specifies your entry for SCCC. If you have multi-mode capability, look and call around the usual SSB frequencies for other contacts (222.100, 432.100, 1296.100).  There will be some mountaintop stations and casual participants to work, and even ten contacts on each of two band in a couple of grid squares will add hundreds of points to our club total.  Our collective contacts with the SCCC rovers could add tens of thousands of points to their scores (because of the higher multipliers they will have), so jump in there and give it a try!

73,

Marty N6VI