[VHFcontesting] September Contest

[David Olean]

Score: Murphy  15    K1WHS  2

It wasn't pretty.  We had great plans to have a pretty nice weekend, but at the last minute, the weather report changed for the worse. Saturday was blistering hot, humid, and accompanied by thunder squalls. The squalls turned to steady rain, and the temperature plummeted down so that we were all looking for fall jackets and rain gear. It rained or drizzled from Saturday afternoon on until the contest ended. The microwave antennas were not liking the rain very much. On top of the miserable weather, with poor conditions, the stuff started breaking. The six meter antenna hit the guy wires and knocked the rotor out of whack several times. The 144 transverter croaked and we were reduced to running FM and 25 watts on SSB for Saturday afternoon and early evening. We lost our voice keyer and CW keying on 50 MHz due to computer problems. Then another Tailtwister on 50 MHz seized up. The generator started leaking fuel oil. (smelled real bad!) Then, when we got that fixed, it started fluctuating in frequency as a diode started shorting out the 24 vdc power buss. I burned my hand trying to clear the red hot diode case from the 24 vdc line. Then our air conditioner broke down and the microwave shack started to get downright unbearable.
    But Murphy was just getting started. Early Sunday morning we were greeeted by a column of black smoke rising from the area of the generator, and then the engine speed started to slow under load. The engine was also overheating. We tried cleaning the oil bath air cleaner to no avail, and limped on for the rest of Sunday, slowly reducing power on the amps as the generator got sicker and sicker. Along about 6 PM we were down to 250 watts max output on the lower four bands. At 9 PM it had it and we shut down, leaving ourselves in the dark. We fired up our little gasoline generator and tried to stay on some of the microwave bands to work a few more grids. The current draw was enough to cause the OMNI V to shutdown on CW keying peaks. That little genset was protesting loudly.  We ended up shutting off the lights and using flashlights to see. We did manage to coax a few more grids out under these conditions. All you people who simply plug your rigs into the wall should feel very fortunate. Making your own electricity is hard!
    We quit at 11 PM after making a few microwave contacts into FN10. (903 thru 10 GHz)  When we awoke Monday and tried to start the big diesel generator, it would not even try to catch. All we can hear is clunking metal and a hard working starter motor! It may be time for it's Last Rites.
    The score is still open to question, as we also had a pretty awesome network failure, and we are patching the log back up as best we can. Here is what we ended up with:
BAND    QSO    GRIDS
50        457        84
144        393        63
222        147        36
432        210        42
903         84        27
1.2          95        28
2.3          71        25    
3.4          57        23
5.7          49        23
10G         51        23
24 G         2           1
The score is a tad over 1.1 million. We were lucky to get that under the trying circumstances and lost operating time.
Some of the ops included K1BX on 50 MHz, K9PW on 144 MHz, N2CEI on 222 MHz, The higher bands were run by an assortment of ops including WZ1V, N1DPM, KA2LIM, WA1T, K1DY N2BOW, and K1WHS.  N1LBI was our chef again, and served up some great food over the weekend.
    So the station is dead in the water at this time. The power unit is rather dead and we are not sure of the cause. We suspect a bad supercharged air blower, which could be very serious as it could throw metal fragments into the cylinders. I should get to look at it next weekend, and hope to find out what is ailing it. You know, if there were some good conditions to anywhere, I might have been cheered up. We didn't catch a break. I heard rumors that the tropo was good a few hundred miles or less to our South. It did not reach us. That thunder squall on Saturday marked a weather front that destroyed any tropo for us for that weekend. Its going to take a while to recover from this! Sort of like getting back to back root canals.

73
Dave K1WHS

ps.
How did we score two points against Murphy you ask?  We worked a few European grids on 144 and 432 when the moon rose at 4 AM. We snuck them in when he wasn't looking.