[VHFcontesting] KE3HT/R Report

[Tim]

I had some absolutely nice warn sunny weather BUT, always a but, the 
winds both days averaged about 15mph with gusts to 25 or more mph. My 
rover has a 6 foot dish and does not have a lot of support for the heavy 
wind loading. I just timed the raising and lowering during low spells in 
wind. I knew it was windy when the wind picked up my 6 foot wood ladder 
and sent it over the guard rail and down the embankment. I did not even 
see that happen I was busy attempting to get out of my van to see if the 
dish moved. I had many situations where the dish moved. I also locked 
the dish in place which meant I could not always peak my dish as I 
normally do before the 5ghz or even 3ghz bands. So sometimes I could not 
make a contact I might normally have made.

6meters had some real fun openings. Even with my puny halo I worked some 
EL, EM, EN and other great grids over 1,000 miles away! 6 meters is a 
compromise band for me. I do not normally do many qso's there.

Saturday night in FN01 I saw that as the sunset the bands all went dead. 
6m thru 5ghz all faded away! Night time is usually the other way around.

Delorme Street atlas 2006 worked great! I love the new feature that auto 
zooms when approaching turns. One problem they have however. The 
calculate fastest route used to work flawlessly. They now have a bug. 
When it recalculates the route the GPS does not match the road (the GPS 
says you drove off the road or the map has errors). The recalculation is 
ALWAYS done using the shortest route which in Pennsylvania means dirt 
roads!

Gas prices is a major cost for me. Last September it cost me $180 for 
just about the same trip. This year it cost me $172. Last year the 
highest price I paid for gas was $3.09/gal and this year the highest was 
$2.99. I even had a big fill up at $2.78/gal! So I would have to say 
that gas is better this year than last September.

Roverlog, Wow, I do not know how I could do all this without it. I even 
used the scheduling functions this time. The calculate function is 
heavily used since I need to compute new contacts and their Magnetic 
bearing. I had a few new contacts get into the ghz range this time due 
to to calc.

I missed many scheds. I wonder why? At least two I missed myself. One 
because I could not point in that direction due to the wind. I will pass 
details on to each that I missed but things were not so perfect as they 
were in September.

Last year my score was 41,820, this year I only had 28,548.

More info: http://www.ke3ht.org/rover/jun2006

,,, Tim KE3HT/R