[VHFcontesting] Sprint

[Dave Olean]

Hi herb
    I know where you are coming from. I am getting older and cannot do what 
I used to do. Today I am confronted by a station that is beyond my 
capability to keep up. Trying to get on 432 for the Sprint shows what I am 
up against.  This winter was really bad for winds. I saw stuff happen this 
year to antennas that have been riding out the winds for at least ten years 
with no troubles. The 432 main mast bent. It is a high strength steel mast 
with over 100,000 psi tensiles. My eight yagi 432 array was just too much 
for the mast. One of the top yagis broke loose and ended up hanging from the 
topmost H frame. I tried to climb up there but it was just too scary. I had 
two gin poles for added support, but I still felt like I was asking for a 
serious problem if I tried to shinny up the 15 ft mast. We ended up taking 
the rotor out and dropping the bent mast and removed the bottom H frame, 
leaving just four yagis. There was no receive on the smaller array now. What 
could be wrong now?  I traced it to a bad Transco Y relay up on the tower. 
It had two problems. First was dirty contacts. The second failure mode after 
I cleaned it was one of the coils opened up! I ended up re building the 
tower mounted relay and preamp box and stringing up a new control cable with 
more conductors and a bigger MIL type multi pin connector. I had to make up 
new 1/2" Superflex and LDF cables to accomodate the new box. Putting that up 
at 100 ft on my wind swept ridge line was difficult, as it has been windy 
most days, with rain squalls. The first time I climbed up with the tested 
box and 150 ft of new control cable, the winds built up to 35 to 40 mph. I 
just managed to get the box installed. I had to tie everything to the tower 
with ropes in case the wind ripped it out of my grip. I was too scared to go 
above the tower to work on the cables, so I had to come back the next day to 
finish connecting things up.
    Wednesday morning, I was working on a new switching scheme for the 
antennas down in the shack after getting the tower box installed. I had to 
modify my sequencer to get isolated relay contacts for the new relay scheme. 
I got it all hooked up at 6:30PM just before the Sprint. I turned on the 
amplifier but the remote blower did not come on. It is in a housing outside 
the shack and too difficult to get at in the fading light. With no air, I 
could not run my big amplifier. I then tried to hook up the driver amp and 
run 80 watts, but was greeted by infinite VSWR when I keyed up the driver 
amp. A little checking showed that there seemed to be no antenna up on the 
tower. (I was hearing signals on 432 just fine) I checked the TX feedline 
with a TDR and saw a big bump 140 ft away that did not change when the radio 
was keyed on. A lot of head scratching and puttering around occurred while 
the Sprint was going on. WA1T was here too. We tried all sorts of tests, and 
figured that maybe I goofed up some wiring in the new tower mtd box. We 
finally found out that we were not getting 24 VDC up to the relay on the 
tower. We finally found a bad set of contacts on the first relay in the 
sequencer.  Then we hooked up the computer to the radio, and, as soon as I 
told the logging program what radio I had connected, the transmitter locked 
up in transmit. The only way I could fix it was to unplug the RS-232 port. I 
grabbed a pen to make a sketch of how to fix stuff, and the pen broke apart, 
and the back end of the pen flew through the air, and the ink refill part 
flew out the door. By this time it is 8:30 local time, and many people are 
going QRT already. Al and I decided to solder a short jumper wire with an 
alligator clip on it to manually turn on the tower mtd coax relay each time 
we wanted to call someone. At almost 9 PM we made our first contact with 80 
watts and half of the old antenna. At one point, I got zapped when hooking 
up the alligator clip, and my arm jerked back and ripped the alligator clip 
and wire right out of the sequencer. Talk about going backwards.
    I can get on 160 meters by running 100 ft of RG-213 to the base of my 
tower. There are no tower mtd preamps, no expensive coax relays, no LDF 
jumpers to be weatherproofed. All I have to do is show up and everything 
works.  CU on the low bands.

Dave K1WHS


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Herb Krumich via VHFcontesting" <vhfcontesting at contesting.com>
To: <vhfcontesting at contesting.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2015 5:11 PM
Subject: [VHFcontesting] Sprint


>I had a young gentleman operate from my location in FN21.
> One small problem is having the 4 x 33's at only 25 feet, although he was 
> able to make some decent contacts. No leaves on the trees here in the 
> Pocono's
> He never worked the grid I live in which is FN21.  I think many stations 
> were only looking for logger schedules instead of tuning or calling CQ.
> Totals here were 32 and 18 with no logger skeds.
> This confirms my station leaving VHF contesting. Since seven years ago, 
> this same station worked 80 contacts in the 432 sprint.  Very sad but 
> reality.
> Anyone want sked off the moon, I can operate on 144 - 432 - 902 - 1296 and 
> 2304
> 73's
> Herb K2LNS
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