I had decided last year that I would operate Sweepstakes from the Tampa ARC facilities, but with my own transceiver. TARC has a very nice complement of antennas, much better than the 40ft high tribander and wire I have a home. I wanted to do a serious assault on the 4-Land record in this contest for Class A. 

Unfortunately, a lightning strike a few months earlier at the club left the facilities a bit tattered. The club station lost all 5 computers, internet connectivity, all antenna routing and switching automation, plus the three main radios in this strike.  

So this contest was done the good old fashioned way... Find mults by turning the big black knob and entering them into wetware between the ears. I even spotted my Yaesu and Kenwood equipped LP competitors 50 watts, just to make things interesting :)  

I had nice towers at W4DUG but we found that the antennas on them had some issues.

The main antenna I planned to use on 20, a Force 12 C19X at 70 feet, would load, but had an SWR of 2.7 across the 20 meter band. It also did not load well on 15 meters. 10 meters showed low SWR, but I couldn’t hear well on that band, so something is definitely wrong up at that feed point.   

The switching gear at the base of the tallest tower and the switching interfaces were not communicating, I figure that the band switch relays were also damaged by lightning... But discovering this two days before the contest left me no recourse but to bypass the automatic antenna switching gear. So the two feed lines to the shack were disconnected from the switch and dedicated to feed the C31XR's 20 meter output to one coax and the Magnum 240X 40 meter beam on the other.  

The C19 was all I had for 15 and 10, so I trusted that the K3 tuner would take care of it and did the best I could with it. Spent a lot of time on 15, more that I should have, considering my trepidation on the antenna's condition, but I knew I would need to be on 15!  Sure enough, I had a single mult on 15; it was the one that counted... Sunday, at 1626z, I found, and was able to work, VE8EV for my second consecutive sweep in ‘phone!

The C31 loaded great; it was essentially a monobander for 20, as I had no easy access to the 15m and 10m feed lines. At 108 feet, it’s not optimized for stateside work!  It reaches out and touches far places… I was called by several Japanese and one Korean when beaming northwest. It also opened the band to EU Sunday morning... Too bad this was a domestic contest. 

The Force 12 Magnum 240X 40m beam at 118ft also had long legs, awakening several Russians, Romanians and Bulgarians, when beaming towards New England. It allowed me to work AK and PAC easily on this band while running, getting those mults out of the way painlessly. This antenna proved to be my bread and butter, delivering solid signals on 40 and resulting in several "is your precedence really A?" comments from folks in the Midwest. But its SWR was a little jumpy as well, and jiggled up and down when it got windy and while turning it, so there is definitely something not right at that feed point too.  

Due to room issues, we make do with a sloping dipole pointed northwest and a rather low (30 ft) Carolina Windom 160 for 80m at TARC. It traditionally has been our weakest band.   The dipole works quite well to NE/MO/IA/KS/ND/SD areas, the Windom has a great pattern up close here in FL, but, as opposed to my more northern competitors, the fish in the Gulf and Atlantic just don’t like to participate in contests like the YCCC and PVRC guys do on 80. The combination of these two antennas helped raise the Q count on 80 above the usual TARC number, but we are not really competitive this far south with 100w and these wires on this band.   

All this stuff was manually switched into the two K3 antenna inputs by my two LDG DTS4 switches which I ripped out of my station and plugged into the TARC system the night before. 

Because the C19 was "sort of working" at the start of the test, I didn’t set it and the C31 on separate rig inputs, so was only able to use diversity receive on 80m. This helped me hear much better on that band than I have ever heard before from TARC, enabling more loud sounding stations to CQ in my face than usual!  

Highlights were busting the KH6MB pile on first call (thanks for hearing me Dan W0CN!), busting the NP4A pileup in Spanish on the first call (On 80, too!) and working many friends including W4SVO, NF4A (who called me on 40 with his feed line on his tribander), K5LAD, K3 List buddy AB2TC, W0CN at KH6MB and Ham Radio Cruise mate W9RE plus many others that I have no room to mention here.  

K3 performance was as usual... I could snuggle up to big signals (if they were clean) and use cracks in the band activity, much to the chagrin of  some of the other ops, who I could not hear, but could hear me in their receivers... Several even accused me of running high power! (Sorry, I can GUARANTEE no cheatin' possible here!   There aint no amps or Internet in the building!)   No crunching, no crashing, no AGC “Dance of Death”, just solid signals with the 1.8 filter and the DSP tightened down. I was, however, at the mercy of my neighbor's IMD and Phase Noise!... 

The KAT3 tuner handled all the screwy antenna issues gracefully; flashing “HIGH SWR!” when it was not happy with what it was working with. 

Save for one beta firmware glitch in the Auto Notch, which Elecraft has now fixed, I had no radio issues at all, even running Beta firmware installed 20 minutes before the start of the contest! 

And I think I have finally reached contest audio satisfaction with this radio. The new TS Gate feature was great for dealing with the echo chamber that is TARC while sitting next to my XYL's portable refrigerator which I borrowed from her classroom, and stocked full of goodies, an arm's length away. That feature will definitely be back next time!   

Lowlights include the usual low power complaint of being blown off of frequencies by the HP guys, although it NEVER happened on 40m! Wide mushy, bass-filled, hard to understand in QRM signals, people who don’t pay attention to correctly tuning their amps so that they don’t splatter (you know who you are on 40!) and the usual casual SS operator malady of having no clue what the exchange is supposed to be and how to send it... How hard is it to read the rules and practice sending the exchange before the contest, guys!  

While I am disappointed that I fell below my goal and probably will not win 4-Land this year, I’m pleased with my second consecutive sweep, I felt loud and I had a lot of fun in those runs and while on S&P with the big beam on 40.   Next year, when TARC is fully operational again (and I have a P3 to add to my arsenal), I will be back for another assault on Low Power Unassisted Class A.  

73 and thanks for the points!