[VHFcontesting] Limited Roving - Worth the Effort?

[Shupienis, Joseph]

Thank you one and all!


Wow! Thanks so much for the helpful info, and supportive comments. You have encouraged me to continue!

If I step back and look at my results, I guess that I'm actually doing better than it seems. My claimed score for the June was 12025, which apparently isn't all that bad for a 3-band, <100 w rover in six sparsely-populated grids. It's better by far than last year's nationwide rover average, and more than twice the score I made last year. 

If rover rule #1 is "Have fun", I can claim success.
If rover rule #2 is "Keep improving", I can claim success there as well.

This is the third year I've taken roving seriously, and my driver and I have come a LONG way from our laughable beginnings, both in terms of equipment and in terms of skill. On our first outing, a fall 6m sprint if I recall correctly, we spent the first hour driving to our tree-infested site, then another hour trying unsuccessfully to tune the antenna, which was an ill-conceived hamstick dipole. Larry and Moe would have been proud! We worked exactly 3 stations and then called it a night. But we had enough fun to want to try it again. Only bigger and better.

Each successive outing has been bigger and better. And more fun. I had a blast in the January VHF. My QRZ profile has a picture of that operation. It helps that I love winter weather. I also love challenges. And I like to share. 

In last month's contest, I'll have to submit as an unlimited rover, since my usual driver/logger/2nd op was unavailable so I had a different cast of characters on Sunday, including the property owner of the EM99 location. Am I right on this? Or should I just enter a check log? Both of those ops got a taste of VHF contesting, and have been expressing a lot of enthusiasm. One even wants to brush up on CW and is now studying to upgrade!

On Field Day, I visited a group set up in FN01. They have a nice tower with 6 and 2 meter beams, and it is seductive to think about how easy (and cheap) it would be to just plant my radios and computer there, plug into the free 120 VAC in the minishack they made from an old Airstream, and maybe show some of them what VHF contesting is all about. It's a very tempting idea, BUT...

That site is only 1600' MSL, and is ... get this ... -1 foot HAAT!!!!! At the TOP of the tower!!!!!!!!!!!

According to RadioMobile, the worst of my rover sites has a +20db better path to the FM19 metro area. My best rove site is +32dB. So now I'm faced with a choice: Tell the boys thanks but no thanks, and go roving as usual, or take a chance on building some VHF  interest and contesting goodwill in the backwoods of the Allegheny National Forest.

Taking into account all the comments I've received, I think I should scale back on the number of grids to only FN01 and FN00. Those are my most productive grids by a large margin, and I can easily raise what few home stations are tuning around in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Rochester and the multitude in FM19. All the Big Guns in a 200 mile radius are easy to work. The Philly folks should be easy, too -- their beacons are always booming in at these two grids. I just need to make more people aware that I'm out there. That's why more time in each grid might maximize the number of folks I can hand out mults to.

If six has a substantial opening, both sites are less than a hour apart, including tear-down and setup, so I could double everybody's fun if there's a sudden big opening. 

The midpoint between them is, coincidentally, the late W3GNR's former home: 41.114441,-78.743262 (in DuBois, PA) and is 7 miles from each. If you are close enough that aiming there would put both sites out of your pattern, you're so close it doesn't matter! :)

I'll be making some noise on .180 when not working S&P. As a rover I think it's up to me to make noise so people can find me. The IC-7000 has automatic CW messages, so listen for my CQs on 144.180 and try voice. If I hear you, I'll try to sort things out.

When people ask me what the secret is to working 62 DXCC from the mobile in less than a year, my one word answer is, "Patience."  I will try to apply that virtue to the upcoming contest. I hope you all can eventually hear and work me. Keep tuning!

73 de Joe, W3BC