Texas Hill Country Roving

Much of my ham equipment is still in Minnesota where I spend the summers (the prime VHF & Up contesting season), so I struggled a bit to put together a viable rover station here in Texas for the January contest.

I wanted a better antenna than a simple omnidirectional loop on 6 meters, but a full size yagi on 6 meters is wider than the street legal limit, so I explored other alternatives. I eventually decided on building a 4-element Moxon. Unfortunately, when placed near the legal limit for vehicle height (about 13.5 feet vs. 14 feet) the antenna was ripped to pieces by overhanging tree limbs in the short drive between my driveway and the expressway. So I had to return home and do my best to patch it back together. I ended up losing all of Saturday's possible operating time rebuilding the antenna, re-configuring the antenna stack to avoid a repeat of the close encounter with neighborhood tree branches, and driving to my planned overnight rest stop location in Oklahoma. Sunday morning, I set out from the hotel in Ardmore OK to a nice rest area alongside the Interstate highway, and began my run back from EM14 down to EL09.

More problems abounded as this was my first time roving in this particular vehicle, and Murphy was along for the ride (as he so often is). The repairs to the 6 meter Moxon were inadequate, as it turned out, because the antenna was performing very poorly. I was hard to hear and hard of hearing on the band. And my 2 meter "brick" refused to work properly, so I ended up removing it from service and running "barefoot" at 20 watts instead of my planned 150 watt level. And in my rush to re-configure the antennas to keep them away from overhead trees, I ended up sacrificing the 432 antenna altogether, limiting me to two bands at best. I definitely landed in the "limited rover" category, and much more limited than I had expected.

Still, the weather was beautiful (Texas in January is certainly finer than Minnesota in January for a rover!) and there were QSO's to be made in spite of my equipment limitations. I managed to activate EM14, EM13, EM12, EM11, EM10, EL19, and EL09 without ever straying very far from Interstate Highway 35. Even though this vehicle gets about twice as many miles per gallon as the vehicle it replaced, Murphy's multiple interventions kept the number of QSO's per gallon in a very low range, which I refused to even compute. It was a fun weekend, even though I certainly did not post a very high score. I learned lots of lessons to follow before my next rove is attempted.