Preparations in the weeks before this contest centered mostly on getting new antennas on 6M as well as fixing the old ones. The bottom 11el in the stack had to be cut out last year due to an open driven element.  A second tower was torn down and rebuilt as a rotating base tower last fall, but there had not been time to install the 8 6M7s in a 4 bay array. The low 5el at 20 feet had to be relocated further away from the new array. It all came together the week before the contest when the antennas went up and the 50’ boom 11 el came down and went back up again the same day. I also brought down the bottom 222 antenna and repaired the phasing harness. Good to go … or so I thought. 1296 had high SWR and required an expedient coax repair the day before the contest. It had a little more loss in the feedline than I’d like with an LMR 400 jumper, but at least it worked. 

Saturday started out good with no Es but a lot of stations to work in the initial hours and a lot more rovers out than usual. I began to see problems with 432 right away and a quick check showed SWR up to 2:1 when it was fine the day before. It was still hearing and getting out but not as good as usual. After the initial QSOs started to dwindle due to no Es on 6M, I decided to climb up and take a quick look. I found nothing wrong up to the preamp so I came back down again. Probably in one of the phasing lines or the power divider and I was not prepared to fix either of those, so I had to live with it. I had to go to CW a lot more often than normal but I didn’t miss too many QSOs.    

 Propagation was essentially flat. 902/3 seemed depressed or maybe just the noise floor is getting higher, but I had lot of QSOs that went well at 1296 and heard nothing at 902/3. Several others I talked to remarked about the same thing. Other 902/3 QSO’s seemed about normal. No real enhancement to speak of on 2M and above, and 6M did not open at all on Saturday. Made for a very long day and by nightfall there were barely 200 Qs in the log.   

WSJT skeds were terrible this time. The rox were scarce on 2M and a lot of the 2M skeds fell flat. Most of those that didn’t took the full time to complete. I had a really bad moment when my computer locked up about 2 minutes before my sked with K1TEO. It wouldn’t even .reboot (I had to physically pull the plug). While I was struggling with it I could hear his bursts on 6M, so I started doing old school SSB Ms sequencing.  Jeff picked up on it right away and we completed this way in under 2 minutes, including instructions from Jeff to QSY to 2M and switch from 15 to 30 second sequences. Makes me wonder if we rely too much on WSJT to do Ms on 6M!  Got the computer working again and we definitely needed the enhancements of WSJT plus all of the allotted time to complete on 2M. 

 Sunday started with flat propagation and didn’t improve much. Only saving grace was when 6M finally opened up aroung 1400Z. It opened in three different directions at once but I was ready for that and kept an antenna parked in each direction. I had to break for a 2 band WSJT sked with W0W gridpedition in EN48 at 1430, but we were able to finish in record time so I still had a 65 QSO hour. Spotty small footprint Es continued for another 3 or 4 hours but kept opening to the same not particularly well populated W0 and W7 places and I quickly worked it out after a few minutes every time I would call CQ. I kept hearing W9RM in DM58 wax and wane all afternoon. If there were as many hams in DM58 as there are in FN31 I’d have cleaned up! A front went through and put me off the air for a half hour too.   

By dinner things had slowed way down and 6M was closed again. I started calling CQ on 6M and worked a lot of single band stations within a couple hundred miles with the new array, but it was mostly a January style slugfest to the end.  No propagation surprises like the Au of the week before and no openings to either the east or west coasts. All in all not a very exciting June VHF contest, at least from my QTH.  

Please send me your contest experiences and comments as well as photos of you and your setup. Seems I just retired last month after 34 years in nuclear power and got recruited to take over writing the June contest article this year.  Now I can say yes I do still have a job, it just doesn’t pay real well anymore.  K2DRH at ARRL dot net.

73 de Bob2