[VHFcontesting] W4IY June VHF

[Lee Bradshaw]

Hello fellow contesters,
Since John (W4NF) stepped down as the coordinator for the VHF contests,
I'll post some of the highlights in his stead.

As usual, W4IY operated from Flagpole Knob in FM08. This was the 20th
year (not 25th) that they've operated from this location. Some of the
guys had a T-shirt made just for this anniversary and we got a nice
group shot of the guys on the mountain.

I have never seen so many RV's on the mountain in my years of coming up
there. We literally took up the entire clearing on the mountain top! We
had many folks turn out this year, along with several new hams that were
interested in contesting.

We got one tower up on Saturday and the rest were up by 11am on Sunday.
We didn't have too many issues but did have to take down the 2 meter
stack due to high SWR, which turned out to be a bad jumper cable from
the relay box. 222 had some kind of problem, but when we lowered the
rocket launcher, it fixed itself! We were up and running right at 2pm.

Not long after the start of the contest, a bad thunderstorm came through
and we actually unplugged everything for about an hour. After that
passed, things were pretty hit and miss as the static crashes were
louder than most of the stations. 2 meters had S9 noise and a terrible
hum on our signal. This lasted until Sunday morning, until the techno
maintenance weenies figured out it was related to some power lines
coming from the 30KW generator.

I was glad to see 6 open as much as it was this year. Last June was
horrible on 6, but 2 and 432 made it interesting. This year our 2 and
432 Q's were way down. We didn't even work our usual 100 Q's on 222.
Everyone was on 6, which is great as we topped our all time record for 6
meter Q's!

I don't have the score totals, but I can say that W3SO might get a run
for their money this year. We'll see what happens when the official
results are posted.

This year, we went from operating in the Army tent to trailers. These
were nice and dry with the nasty storms we were getting. The downside
was we had them connected with a walkway and there were several bumped
heads while crossing between the trailers.

We also tried a Flex 5000 setup on 222 this year. It's a great rig but
the learning curve is high and most of us didn't want to operate it. It
was however great for S&P.

With the 30KW generator, we were able to run 1200 watts on 6 and 1300
watts on 2 this year. That extra 3db really helped.

It was another fun time on the mountain and we trained several new ops
this year. I'm sure we missed a few Q's because of that, but it's worth
it to get some new hams interested in VHF.

Some highlights of the contest were:

The opening on 6 to the Caribbean and Mexico
Working DM's at 3am on 6 meters
Delta House party on Friday night with live music at 4300'
Pointing the 2 meter stack at K4GUN/R in FM26 and wondering why we
couldn't hear him (stack was off 45 degrees due to high winds)

See you in September and thanks to all who worked us, especially the
rovers!

Lee K4UVA