My microwave stuff has been "down" for well over a year. My rotator that turned everything had died and I was just not motivated to climb the big tower and remove something that weighs 60 lbs all by myself. I finally got up the nerve this Summer, ate my Wheaties, and got the rotator working again.  I had plenty of trouble getting all the gear to perform though. Stuff has a habit of going bad if neglected! As a result, there was not much operating, and way too much repairing! I spent most of the weekend on the towers.

One nice thing, though was the scheduled outdoor meeting and associated cookout with the New England Radio Discussion Society (The NERDS) that took place here at the K1WHS shack at noon on Saturday. I figured that it was a good way to show a bunch of HF type ops what UHF and microwaves have to offer. Besides the hotdogs and hamburgers at the grill, the NERDS were also shown some real QSOs on 1296. When they saw that the other end of the contact was only running 2 watts, that piqued their interest. Most thought that microwaves were line of sight only! There was more excitement when they all heard the 10,368 MHz beacon on Mt Greylock 150 miles away, peaking on two different headings. One was the direct path, and the other was off a passing rain storm somewhere along the MA-NH border! The hissing sound of the rain scatter was a great teaching tool. Most there were unaware of such neat forms of propagation.

As far as the contest went, I'll spare the details on everything that did not work, but we really were bummed out when we found the 432 receive had gone west at the start of the contest! That band had been working fine just a few days previously.   There was some success on the microwaves. We had a great contact with WB2RVX on 3456 with what sounded like strong rain scatter propagation. The weird thing was that there was deep and rapid QSB. Normally rain scatter is pretty steady. Saturday night had some nice local tropo down to the NYC area, but not much farther. A few signals were very loud. WA2LTM on 1296, sounded like he was parked in my driveway. Other stations not blessed with being in the sweet spot were their normal weak signals for a 275 mile path. We heard K1RZ in FM19 on 1296 Sunday morning quite well, but could not complete. Darn!

Operators here included N1JFU both days, and K1DY for a few hours on Sunday morning. It was a pretty thin crew, but we still had a bunch of fun. Our score was just under 50K.