[VHFcontesting] January VHF Contest-K1WHS

[David Olean]

Hello VHFers

It was very difficult to operate without 50 or 144 MHz this weekend. 
Those bands are needed to find other stations and then run up to the 
higher bands. With energy costs thru the roof, I took out the 10 meter 
and six meter op position after the ARRL 10 Meter contest in mid 
December along with my solar lithium battery system. My higher freq VHF 
shack is unheated, so after walking up the road to the VHF shack, and 
starting the diesel generator, the room temp was about 35 and the 
electric baseboard heating started working at warming up the room. I 
only had 222 and 432, but it was my first effort with using just one 
operating position. That took some getting used to. I kept turning the 
wrong rotators! I have since made up more labels for the many rotator 
control boxes. I was QRV from about 00:00 to about 03:00 UT on Saturday 
evening only, and things were slow due to no 144 MHz access. I found the 
chat pages to be difficult to use as messages can easily get lost in the 
weeds with all the activity.  Guys in the active areas were hard to 
corner. I had better luck with people far away from activity centers on 
the chat pages. I think it is information overload!!  Things were slow 
here, but conditions were OK. The antennas were not iced up and both 222 
and 432 performed as usual. No exotic DX was worked. It was fun for work 
N3NGE and N3EXA. Normally I was an operator at N3NGE for January,  back 
when multi-op efforts were fun. N3NGE sounded like a local up here in 
FN43 Mumbo Jumbo land. S9 on both 222 and 432!  I worked very few 
stations to the South. Opportunity was just not there in the short time 
I was active. Again, I really missed having a 144 station here.  I did 
snag VE3ZV in EN92 on 222. VE3MIS was peaking S7 on 432 SSB from 
Toronto, but we could not work on 222.

222 MHz 21 stations    14 grids

432 MHz    19 stations    11 grids

Total score was 1900 points. I did not operate any digital modes and 
stayed analog, but did listen a bit on FT8 and heard many unknown calls 
from around New England. In the past, I have been underwhelmed by the 
efficiency and effectiveness of FT8 on VHF.  I think it helps out those 
who do not know Morse Code, so it gives some ops a great boost. I do not 
see much of any boost here, so I operate analog only.   MSK144 and JT65 
etc are very effective, but with my short activity period, I did not 
have a chance at those modes. I only ran CW and SSB.

It started snowing again on Sunday night and now the ground has a 
covering of over 20" and it is still snowing. I think my 222 Activity 
periods are on hold for awhile. With 2 ft of snow, the trek up the hill 
gets very difficult!!


73

Dave K1WHS