2007 ARRL September VHF Contest
09/11/2007 |
K2DRH
With family and work schedules, dont have the time to spend on a long detailed write up this time. Suffice it to say that conditions were reasonable and that the station was working well after replacing all of the rotor loops and doing quite a bit of overdue maintenance on the tower and the station the week before. Even with a weeks vacation it was a tough drive to get it all done in time. Id deferred doing it until cooled off like it usually does the first week of September, but I waited in vain, spending 6 hours hanging from a safety belt on the hottest day of the year here in western Illinois.
The contest started off slow but steady. A nice 6M Es opening to Texas lasted several hours, but didnt have a lot of depth behind it. The higher bands were frustrating on Saturday afternoon but the cooler evening brought surprisingly good conditions to the northeast and southeast where a lot of stuff went into the log before the WSJT skeds. Id made more skeds than usual and all of them were successful except 2M to WB1GQR, where I heard very few pings at my end! Im not sure he heard me at all! I even made a few randoms between skeds and didnt get to bed until almost 0800, getting up
again at 1100 for a sked with K0AWU at 1130 where we ran 4 bands on a combination of CW and JT65b at 400 miles.
Sunday morning was very nice with weak enhancement down to OK, TX and AR. No more Es though and by 10AM it was like someone turned off a switch and the bands all went pretty flat. They picked up somewhat during the evening again, but the rest of the contest was a lot quieter. It seemed like activity was up though and the score reflects it. It was fun tracking the rovers and their efforts were really outstanding. Some of the further away ones were so busy
with the close in stations when I found them that I was unable to work them despite getting their attention as they went through the bands trying to work a large entourage from all different directions. Unfortunately many times after the initial flurry of activity in getting to a new grid died out the rover
seemed to go away too and revisiting the coordination frequency only a little while later either resulted in silence, or vainly waiting for prolonged attempts to work one band with one station at the expense of the others. W9FZ/R really stands out among them all as an excellent traffic manager and I swept him from 6M to 2.3G in 7 of the 8 grids he activated (we had tough conditions in one of the late Sunday afternoon grids and missed 2.3G). Most times it took under 5 minutes for us to run on all 7 bands.
As always there is some exciting stuff to be had towards at the very end of the Sept contest and this year was no disappointment. K4TO in EM77 got my attention and we worked on 6 bands. After working several more new and fairly close-in stations for new band grid multipliers, I was calling CQ on 6M during the last minute of the contest KB9WLM caught me and we immediately went to 1.2G and worked it for a new mult with only seconds to spare. All in all there were decent, but not outstanding conditions. My best Sept score yet, hope it withstands the Atlantic coastal tropo opening. -- K2DRH EN41VR IL
The contest started off slow but steady. A nice 6M Es opening to Texas lasted several hours, but didnt have a lot of depth behind it. The higher bands were frustrating on Saturday afternoon but the cooler evening brought surprisingly good conditions to the northeast and southeast where a lot of stuff went into the log before the WSJT skeds. Id made more skeds than usual and all of them were successful except 2M to WB1GQR, where I heard very few pings at my end! Im not sure he heard me at all! I even made a few randoms between skeds and didnt get to bed until almost 0800, getting up
again at 1100 for a sked with K0AWU at 1130 where we ran 4 bands on a combination of CW and JT65b at 400 miles.
Sunday morning was very nice with weak enhancement down to OK, TX and AR. No more Es though and by 10AM it was like someone turned off a switch and the bands all went pretty flat. They picked up somewhat during the evening again, but the rest of the contest was a lot quieter. It seemed like activity was up though and the score reflects it. It was fun tracking the rovers and their efforts were really outstanding. Some of the further away ones were so busy
with the close in stations when I found them that I was unable to work them despite getting their attention as they went through the bands trying to work a large entourage from all different directions. Unfortunately many times after the initial flurry of activity in getting to a new grid died out the rover
seemed to go away too and revisiting the coordination frequency only a little while later either resulted in silence, or vainly waiting for prolonged attempts to work one band with one station at the expense of the others. W9FZ/R really stands out among them all as an excellent traffic manager and I swept him from 6M to 2.3G in 7 of the 8 grids he activated (we had tough conditions in one of the late Sunday afternoon grids and missed 2.3G). Most times it took under 5 minutes for us to run on all 7 bands.
As always there is some exciting stuff to be had towards at the very end of the Sept contest and this year was no disappointment. K4TO in EM77 got my attention and we worked on 6 bands. After working several more new and fairly close-in stations for new band grid multipliers, I was calling CQ on 6M during the last minute of the contest KB9WLM caught me and we immediately went to 1.2G and worked it for a new mult with only seconds to spare. All in all there were decent, but not outstanding conditions. My best Sept score yet, hope it withstands the Atlantic coastal tropo opening. -- K2DRH EN41VR IL
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