12/05/2004 | KG6WJF From Alameda, CA. East Bay Section

The December 2004 160M Contest was the first use of our brand new club call sign, KG6WJF. Most of the members of the Amateur Radio Club of Alameda (ARCA) had never operated on the Top Band. Setting up for this contest was an education as most of our home stations won't support large wire antennas. None of us knew what to expect in the way of antenna requirements, noise, propagation and band activity. We were not disappointed.

There was no lack of contacts after the sun went down. QSOs from the San Francisco Bay Area to the east coast were few and far between but there were plenty of strong signal from Colorado, Texas, Washington and Oregon. Stations within a 100 mile radius were strong enough to overload the receiver front end and receiver intermod was quite noticable when trying to work the weak stations.

We were able to install a full half wave dipole using fiberglas poles that are usually reserved for Field Day. With the wire hoisted up about 25 feet, over a driveway and through some trees, we obtained a reasonable operating bandwidth of 80 KHz or so. A little wire trimming on the dipole brought a 1:1 match in at 1.845 MHz. KJ6AF hit this tuning target in with just one try! I'm sure that a more extensive antenna would improve performance but this modest dipole worked fine for this contest.

Joe -- KL7IDY