I have operated in a few 10 Meter contests, just S&P’ing and I really enjoy the band. One of my goals was to make a decent 10 meter station at my VHF ham shack here in Maine, but, as usual, time ran out. Winter is here, and there is no 10 meter tower to hang beams on. I did the next best thing and kludged a simple station together for the 10M test by erecting a 30 ft tower with a homebrew 5 el beam and rotator. The temporary tower is sitting on solid rock and guyed to convenient trees nearby. Art, K1BX and I put it together on a Saturday in late November. I got all excited to see it up, and built two more beams and bolted them to an existing VHF tower leg at 40 and 60 ft. I figured we could point these toward South America. I built up a single band 10 meter amplifier last winter, and dragged that up the hill to use in the competition. I figured the 10 Meter Contest would be a good test of the new homebrew amp.

            The Contest itself was a comedy of errors. Friday started well with K1BX and me up at the shack. We ran multi single and Art had his laptop with wireless internet. It was great to see the spots Friday night, although there were few spots from New England for any DX. We did have some good E skip to the Midwest and Art rattled off a 150 hour in the middle of the evening. After almost 400 Qs, we quit at 12:30 PM local time. Art went home, and I hit the sack down at the house. On Saturday morning, W1UE showed up and we were dismayed to see that the wireless connection was dead. Now we had no internet at all. Dennis started to work CW anyway with my K3. Dennis has a K3 as well, so it was funny that he accidentally pushed the receive antenna button and disconnected the main antenna from the receiver. Neither of us noticed it. I remember saying the band had died almost as if someone had flipped a switch. (heh heh)  We spent the rest of the day with Dennis scratching out weak cw contacts and lamenting how the band was so flat. We had all sorts of theories as to what had caused such a major communications outage so quickly! At one point there was a huge CRAAACCCKK! And the amplifier just stopped in its tracks. Dennis figured we were done with a dead amplifier, but a quick look under the “hood” of the amp told me otherwise. Apparently I never tightened some hardware on the coupling capacitors and it had shifted and caused an arc over to the coil that obliterated the poor little Z-28 rf choke on the Pi Network output side.  I had it back on the air in 20 minutes after winding a new choke. Dennis worked about 250 stations. Not bad for not using an antenna for most of it. Needless to say the signals were all very weak!  At 5 PM Dennis had enough and went home. I went down to the house for dinner and found an email from W1QA asking why I could not hear him on 10 meters. I took some test gear back up to the shack after dinner to look for a problem. It was then that I discovered the laptop and second monitor decided to head west. I was greeted with black screens. I could not get the monitors to work.  When it rains it pours! After being greeted by a dead computer, I discovered the misplaced receive switch on the K3!! I just started to laugh. What a dope I am. I worked a few stations and went home. Without a computer log it was tough to tell who was a dupe and who wasn’t!

            Art was back on Sunday and fixed the laptop. We spent the morning explaining to everyone who called us the day before and could not work us, why we could not hear them. More laughs from the ranks at our expense.  Art recovered nicely. We had no internet, but he did a remarkable job adding to the score. The amplifier purred along just fine. The homebrew yagis stayed up amidst a driving rainstorm and high winds. The sections piled up. There was not much from Europe that we worked, a few Slovenians, Portugal etc. It seems the propagation this far north was poor compared to more southerly paths. The most excitement was working KH6 and KL7 late in the afternoon within a minute of each other, and then nabbing ZL a few minutes later. Strangely, we never snagged OK, AR, NE, or either of the Dakotas.  There was some good propagation to the West Coast on Sunday, so we worked everything that we missed on Saturday. South America was in there well after dark. All in all, it was an eventful weekend. I had fun watching W1UE and K1BX show me how it should be done. (Well everything except the disconnecting the receive antenna part.) I am not 100% sure, but I’ll bet we missed a lot of good stuff by running without an antenna on Saturday. I already put the “Kick Me” sign on my backside.