Wow, soapbox BEFORE the contest starts.  Hepburn looks AWFUL!  Wx here will deep freeze ...

1/24/11

Hepburn predicted a totally bleak weekend for tropo propagation and was right on the money.  The bitterly cold and dry weather kept the noise levels way up high. Couple all that with the total lack of any Es or Aurora (though a few signals up north sounded a tad raspy on Sunday evening) and you get the perfect prescription for a lackluster January VHF Sweepstakes. Stir in the Bears Packers rivalry and you have an even slower Sunday afternoon in the Midwest. This contest lived up to all of that excitement and more.

I’d been inordinately busy in October and November with work, medical, travel and family stuff so nothing much got fixed. The record cold and snow in December and January pretty much precluded any tower work so I went with the same configuration on 1296 and above as Sept that limited my ability to work 2304 and 3456. Fingers only work for a few minutes in single digits. A week before the contest a power supply AC plug dislodged itself from the wall (dog or N2KMA’s vacuum? nobody’s talking) causing a 6M transverter failure when the relay dropped out that keeps the TS-850 from transmitting into the Rx port. Luckily that was easy to deal with.  A diode failure on my transverter IF switch killed the 432 receive. I had no diodes (didn’t come in time) but I had another box albeit with a ratty rotary switch and less band to band isolation.  

As predicted the contest was slow, but not really all that much slower than usual. Come to think of it, it was pretty normal compared to the last few years. For the most part it was tough working 903 and above out any distance. The sub zero temps kept the rovers home in droves and I worked only one stalwart, KF0Q/R who only brought the bottom 4.  When condition are like that folks just don’t seem to hang around for the whole contest, so you have to be in the seat all the time to catch them for that hour or so they give it before they get bored, then go do something else. Luckily everyone doesn’t get on at the same time. By evening I was on pace for a typical January. WSJT went well, the rox were pretty good and I made all of my skeds except for one I learned later had equipment problems on the other end.  But there were few randoms to be had, so I went to bed and got a few hours sleep.   

This was the contest for ratty pots, connectors, switches and brushes. I had 2M go dead on me on Saturday only to find that the transverter Rx IF gain pot had gotten oxidized (an easy fix). The AF gain on the microwave IF rig is getting really bad and the transverter switch for the lower 4 bands was just awful. My mic rig switchover connections went ratty and had to be cleaned.  Finally the rotor stopped turning a couple hours before the big game. One of the brushes had slipped in the DC motor and was arcing. I didn’t bring up the tools to fix it right by reburnishing the rotor, but got it working again anyway. Sure was cold up there! Of course it crapped out again about 3 hours before the end of the contest necessitating a more permanent (and even colder) fix in the dark while it was snowing. Who says radio contesting is not a physical sport?  

Sunday brought some unexpected but short lived long haul stuff out almost 500 miles to the south, but for the most part it was pretty dead with few stations on at any given time.  6M tropo and scatter were good all contest.  The atmospheric and electrical noise was horrendous to the west and even to places to the east where it usually isn’t a problem. The usual good stations did well on 4 or  6 bands out to 400 miles, but there seem to be fewer and fewer of them all the time. The second to last hour brought a lot of new mults to the south so I’m glad I went up the tower again, but the last hour was really slow this time. All in all, a typical January effort with a slightly better score than last year.