[VHFcontesting] September VHF contest

[Nick Pick]

Hi Sean, yes still thinking on how to improve, already know that I want a second battery and probably a solar panel because there's not a lot of time to operate on a saturday, and dismounting everyting when it's dark is a pain in the lower region and probably focus on operating on sunday the next year, exept january, I will be on our local mountain here so can go saturday and sunday...
For mast, I use 2x 10' of electrical metal tubing (forget in what material is made) that I buy for 15$ each at Home Depot but with antennas, the thing is too heavy and difficult to raise alone, I was lucky to have someone doing a sota to help me raise it!
Will try to cut 1 tube at 5 feet and try to raise it alone, perhaps next monday for the 144MHz sprints, but not sure yet... Yes alredy thinking and planning, my next major move will be a 220MHz tranverter and antenna and after that good coax and.... it's never ending hi hi, take care and see you on the bands!


Nicolas

VE2NCG

Le 12 sept. 2017 à 10:32, Sean Waite <waisean at gmail.com<mailto:waisean at gmail.com>> a écrit :

Hi Nick,

It really was chilly Saturday night, at our FN32 stop it got down to about 10*C.

I tried listening for your a couple times, but it was pretty chaotic getting set up at both of our Saturday sights so I couldn't spend a whole lot of time. Roving is a ton of fun, and a very good way to avoid issues with your home QTH being in a valley or restricted from having antennas.

CW is useful, it's something I need to work on more as well. I can kludge along if need be, which is good enough for this sort of contest.

What are you using for a mast? Looks like PVC.

Welcome to the portable club. Now you get to spend every day until the next contest determining how to improve your locations and station!

Sean WA1TE - K1SIG/R

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 8:35 AM Nick Pick <nicolasgagnon at hotmail.fr<mailto:nicolasgagnon at hotmail.fr>> wrote:
ARRL 2017 Sept VHF

Hello all!
Decided to operate portable this time and we decided (Me and Eric VA2MO)
to operate on Mt-Radar at FN46ki, a 3 hours ride and it was supposed to be warm
and sunny.... not so much as you can see in the album below:

Album at: https://imgur.com/gallery/ZtFCQ

Installation when without a fuss and everyting was in order and Eric was doing
his SOTA activation and as I was looking at the sky, I decided to unwrap the tarp
and install it just in case... of course, 5 minutes before the contest,
Murphy's Law when into effect:

https://youtu.be/qwy65XcnViU

It's was wetter, colder and inconfortable than when I was Rover in january...
after half an hour, decided to brig all the equipment inside the truck and since
I decided this time to use 20' of mast insted of 10, the coax for the 6m and the
ground plane for FM where too short... anyway, still get the V/U horizontal and a
6m vertical and decided to make somme noise on the bands and was fun anyway,
portable will be my niche from now on. Thanks to all that have worked me and special
thanks to everyone who have try! As a rookie, I have learn that cw is very important
when the band are so-so, next "upgrade" to my station would be to learn cw!

Nick VE2NGC
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