[VHFcontesting] [NEWSVHF] 222 Activity night

[David Olean]

Thanks for being there and making noise on  222, Ron.

Good Buddy Ron has been a fixture on Tuesday nights and I am thrilled 
that the good activity on Tuesday has held up over the winter months.

I did manage to get back on last night and made 14 QSOs. I had lots of 
problems that prevented me from turning the beam and twirling the tuning 
knob. I spent most of the evening hunting down some weird rf noise. I 
also had some switching power supply noise that covered 5 kHz right at 
222.100.  Then I lost some RF output and could not figure that out.  I 
had spent the day tracking down some high VSWR on both the quad yagi and 
my LVA. I was up on the tower and checked the LVA at its' feed. It 
looked great!  I finally tracked the problem to a dirty 4 position motor 
driven coax relay. It was a Transco 1460 series 4PST type. The 
connections had developed quite a bit of series resistance. The weird 
part was that it did not look that bad on the TDR, so I did not catch it 
at first.

I never did get the antenna aimed out west and missed some contacts 
there for sure. Signals were quite weak with plenty of QSB.  At some 
point, I noted that my preamp had died. It was working fine in the 
afternoon, and I am afraid that I blew it out while trying to figure out 
what was wrong. (I need some re training after a long winter) The blown 
preamp took some wind out of my sails, but I made some more calls for 
awhile at 9 PM and found WA3NUF. Phil had a good signal on SSB, peaking 
at S7 or 8. Both K1PXE and WZIV worked Phil after 9PM and I could hear 
them also with their beams aimed SW.  I heard K2RMX with a great signal 
on SSB, but there was so much activity on 222.105, that I had no chance 
to call him without QRMing others. Many calls on 222.110 produced no 
contact.  Not having the internet chat room available might have hurt 
me, as I could not announce my frequency.  Radios do have a big knob on 
them, and it does not hurt to twirl it. There was lots of activity in MA 
running low power and small antennas. The activity there is impressive.

So I have a bunch of work left to get things running well on 222 MHz, 
but, at least, I am back on and it feels good to have things getting 
back to normal. Thanks to all who were on, and I promise to have things 
working a bit better next time.

73

Dave K1WHS

On 4/5/2022 9:14 PM, Ron Klimas WZ1V wrote:
> 222 activity and condx were fair in the middling tonight.
> Great to hear K1WHS back on, Managed to work 15:
> W1XR FM19, KR1ST FN21, K1WHS FN43, K1PXE FN31,
> W1GHZ FN34, KC2KAE FN20, W9KXI FN12, WA1PBU FN42,
> W1AIM FN34, N2JMH FN12, W1FKF FN43, K1TR FN42,
> K2RMX FN20, N2SLO FN30, and WA3NUF FN20.
> Wish I could have stayed up later but just too tired tonight.
> Don't forget 222 Spring is 2 weeks from tonight.
>
> 73 Ron WZ1V FN31RH
>
>