[SECC] ARRL 160 AA4GA Single Op QRP

[Lee Hiers]

ARRL 160-Meter Contest

Call: AA4GA

Class: Single Op QRP
Operating Time (hrs): 18:48
Radios: SO2R

Summary:

Total:  QSOs = 392  Sections = 57  Countries = 4  Total Score = 48,556

Club: South East Contest Club

Comments:

I wasn't able to start working on the re-hanging of the inverted-L until 10
minutes before the start of the contest - the antenna came down in the
storms
and I hadn't made it a priority.  I discovered that it wasn't a broken
support
rope as I thought, but the wire itself had broken.  So, I had to splice that
together.  I got a fair shot into the tree first try, so I didn't try to
perfect it.  Instead of an inverted-L 65 up and 65 over, it was more like an
inverted-U 65 up, 30 over and 35 down...more or less.  Took about an hour.

It took a while to figure out which feed line I needed to send into the
shack...because, as it turns out, I had infinite SWR on all of them at 1.8
MHz.
 It was already dark, and I was about to bag it.  After fixing supper and
thinking on it, I decided the feed line had to be bad...it was, so I dug
out a
spool of coax, added connectors and ran it to the antenna...finally got it
on
about 4 hours into the contest.  Slept a fair bit the first night between
midnight and sunrise.  And I ended up watching the SEC championship game
(excellent outcome!), so I missed some more prime time.  I tried to hang in
all
night, but kept falling asleep.  The sun finally shut me down at about 8am
on
Sunday.

QRP on 160 is really odd...lots of S9+ signals can't hear you - in some
cases,
they just have a different RX antenna selected, but often, they just can't
hear.  Bright side is that no RX antennas are required.

I was going to play with SO2R, but with only 1 160 antenna, it was a bit of
a
PITA.  I would find a station to call on the 80m antenna, then do a
frequency
swap between radios, but the callsign didn't always carry over as expected,
and
when swapping back to the run frequency using Alt-F6, the Run mode wasn't
reselected.  So I did very little listening on the 2nd radio.

Oh, I was going to operate assisted, with Skimmer feeding spots, but the
frequency Skimmer gave me from the KX3 wasn't reliable, and the cluster kept
dropping connection, so I never go that going and just went plain old
unassisted.

I've got a lot of work to do, but overall happy with the results.  Worked
C6,
PJ2, XE, and ZF.  Heard a lot of west coast, but only QSO'd one California
station...none in Washington or Oregon.  Only AZ, MT and WY in 7-land.  I
did
hear a KL7 late, but no KH6.

May try the Stew...if not, see you in the CQ160!

KX3 and K3 at 5 watts to Inverted-U with elevated feed.
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