[VHFcontesting] My results - 2008 CQ WW VHF Contest

[Ellen Rugowski]

Well, this years CQ WW VHF has come and gone.  Condx. were mediocre the majority of the time for me.  6 was spotty at best for Es, giving us mini-openings at best.  I was only able to work one station via Sporadic E - W5LCC in DM93.  3 minutes after I worked him, he dropped back down into the noise.  Tropo was also a mixed bag for me.  There was some enhancement on 6 & 2 from tropo. Signals on 2 were pretty good. No major long haul stuff,  but Jerry, WB9Z was stronger on 2m than the typical EN60 stations I work here from the extreme northeast corner of EN52.  Greg, K9KL in EN64 also had a very strong signal here.  When the enhancement was happening (mainly on Saturday afternoon and night), I worked stations via tropo on 6m, that I normally have a very hard time working.  Bob, K2DRH, and I completed on 6, in what has to be record time. I was only running 15W at the time. In the past, even with 100W, it's often taken several tries to work him.  In a nutshell, the contest condtionswise, was almost like the ARRL UHF contest.  Sunday was very disappointing.  The Hepburn tropo map indicated that we should get decent tropo today - that wasn't the case at all.  I also lost about 4 hours of operating time,when several of my gabby friends decided to call me for long chats.  Oh well.    

Setupwise -  I set up portable on my apartment balcony (I live on the 2nd floor, on top of a hill).  For 6m, I clip leaded the same rain gutter I use for HF, and used a 6m antenna tuner.  It was cheesy, but it worked.  For 2m, I used a 5 element 2m/432 log periodic from Elk Antennas on a homebrew stand.  I wish I could have done a pure QRP effort, but the Yaesu FT-620B I used on 6m was the limiting factor.  Like many rigs of its vintage (the late 70s & early 80s), it has no power adjustment option.  So, I was stuck with 15W of output.  In retrospect,  I could have probably changed the internal ALC for 10W max, or tricked it via the back accessory socket with a 9V battery (if I'd known what pins to apply the voltage to [the manual gives no information on what pin does what]), but I didn't feel like opening it up, to make a change for 1 contest.   

As for 2m - I now am the owner of an ICOM IC-910H.  I didn't feel like disconnecting my only 30 amp power supply from the HF rigs, so I used an old Astron RS-10A I've had since the late 80s,and throttled back the power from 100W, to about 20W (all the supply would handle - any more would cause it to kick out).  I had a tough choice between the IC-910H and the FT-736R (I had a line on a few of them), but advice from a few other hams, convinced me that I should bite the bullet moneywise, and get the IC-910H.  It worked great for the contest, giving me VHF & UHF capability, I haven't had in over 9 years (the only VHF/UHF rig I've ever has that was even close to this rig, was the FT-736R I sold back in 1999 to pay bills).  Here's the run down of my semi-QRP effort:

6m        8 QSOs      5 grids
2m      19 QSOs     10 grids    

Total    27 QSOs    15 grids

Score = 690 points

73,
Ellen - AF9J