01/22/2019 | K2EZ/R Dire forecasts of a massive snowstorm with ice persuaded me to shelve my plans for a long rove. I opted instead to stay close to home, do what I could before the storm rolled in, take a break, get some good rest and get out Sunday when the overnight rain and warmer temps would improve the roads.

Having decided this would significantly limit my effort, I made a last minute decision to make this a six band effort rather than four bands. Antennas and feedline were in place but I always operated microwaves separately from VHF/UHF. This was an easier said than done change. More detail on that at the end.

I went up to High Point NJ for the start of the contest. About 40 minutes from home. I could operate from there till I saw the snow start and make it home before things got bad. The forecast suggested I would get an hour or two operating time.

The start of the contest was a bit rocky. I had lots of issues from that last minute decision to add two bands. Nevertheless I worked them out and operation got much smoother. By my past contest starts from this location, it was a very slow, but that is a part of the price for the lessons learned.

Ninety minutes into the contest I saw the first snowflakes. At two hours the snow was steady and very light. I decided it was time to get closer to home. As I progressed towards home the snow stopped and started again but didn’t accumulate. Since there was not yet any snow cover, I decided to drive 5 miles to hop over the grid line to another small hilltop with a decent view. By this time my operation was fairly smooth. After about an hour, the snow started to pick up and I decided my time at that site was done.

Back in my home grid, there were some stations that were shadowed while I was at High Point so I went to the top of the hill by my house and tried to work them. One thing lead to another and while snow started to accumulate I moved around to a bunch of points on that hilltop including crossing back and forth over the grid line a few times. FN20 comes close to my house but the location of the line is off the top of the hill a bit and not as desirable as that hilltop 5 miles away.

I decided to knock off when snow had accumulated to about an inch. I had no issues getting home. I set my alarm for 6:45 with plans to get on the road by 7am. In my area it was supposed to get well above freezing overnight and there was supposed to be rain. So I was expecting the roads to be clear.

When my alarm went off in the morning, it was still very dark out. I looked outside the roads didn’t look very good so I decided to sleep in another hour. An hour later at 8am the roads were looking good, but when I got the rover however it was covered in ice. Very pretty ice but a quick check confirmed the radios didn’t like the ice on the antennas.

Fortunately it was above freezing. So I decided that the above freezing temperatures would melt the ice faster if I was moving so I turned the antennas about 40 degrees to get the maximum wind capture and started to work my way southward to where they saw just rain and no ice. This worked fairly well and in about 15 miles the ice was completely off the loopers. Some remained stubborn like around the T matches of the yagis and I eventually climbed on the roof of the rover to break the last bits off.

About 8:30am I was in a position where I could work stations, but discovered there really weren’t many on. It wasn’t until about 10:30 that a significant number of stations were up. I should have remembered that any fixed stations that woke up to ice on their antennas like I had, didn’t have the easy options for getting the ice off like I did. I later came to learn that many of the southern New England stations were knocked off the air for the remainder of the contest due to the ice.

Activity was generally lower in part because of all the New England stations that weren’t on the air. The other is that many stations were operating FT8. I could operate 6m FT8 and did so, but these contacts never resulted in QSYing to other bands. I didn’t have 2m FT8 going but I could hear lots of 2m activity on FT8. Unfortunately, without beams to let me get stronger signals further out and get selectivity against strong local stations, most I worked on FT8 were fairly local.

If it weren’t for the fact I had a list of numbers I can TXT or call people it would have been pretty difficult to get many contacts. I also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make 902 and 1296 contacts on paths that just weren’t working. Again that was part of the learning process. The lower number of stations calling CQs, the more on FT8 that one couldn’t get to QSY, and my spending extra time with the new bands resulted in a rather low QSO count. Similarly with fewer random contacts and limited distance covered this rove, I had a very low number of multipliers despite 10 mults from the new bands.

My rove Sunday took me to four new grids to bring my total activated up to six. I went in a loop from where I am in Northwest NJ down south to the outskirts of Baltimore MD and then back up north thru Harrisburg PA and then the grid corner by Hazleton PA. Closing the loop at the end of the contest.

My last grid was FN11. From what I can tell, FN11 had not otherwise been activated in the contest. Several stations remained active till the very end solely to get the multipliers that I could give them when I got there.

The only other thing of particular note was Sunday afternoon the wind started kicking up. It was getting really bad as it got later. The last 90 minutes of driving from Harrisburg to Hazleton on Rt 81 were some of the most difficult driving I’ve done due to the wind wanting to blow the car around.

I would characterize my overall score as dismal at approximately 22K in the classic rover category. If I were to submit as a limited rover, and not take credit for the Qs on the two new bands, my score drops to about 12K. That is the lowest four band score since my first experimental rove in 2015.

All in all I consider it a learning experience and that was my intent once I changed plans. Overall I am satisfied.

With regards my last minute decision to add 902 and 1296 to this rove…

Heretofore I had only used those bands in the microwave sprints. While I had the antennas and feedline in place, I had not yet worked out how to easily switch from the VHF and UHF bands to the microwave bands without having to swap cables around. With the scaled back effort, I decided worst comes to worst I could take it at a slower pace and just switch cables.

Thus Friday night I found myself rewriting of my logging software that had only supported four bands, to accommodate the extra bands. Saturday morning I started to put the 902 and 1296 hardware back into the rover. This time I had to find a better mounting that didn’t completely block the amplifier heatsinks.

I then realized that if I used a different rig for 2m SSB/CW rather than try and make the Flex work as primary 2m as well as the IF for 902 and 1296, I could reduce coax swaps to just one. Then using a coax switch I had laying around, I was able to eliminate the coax swapping completely.

As mentioned, the start of the contest was somewhat rocky. In my initial setup I had configured both transverters into the flex radio. Thus to switch transverters, I had to select the different pan adapter and flip the coax switch. The setup turned out to be very cumbersome. In practice I would forget one or the other.

The long and short of it is that I made it overly complex. All I had to do was have the Flex radio key both transverters at once. At that point he coax switch in the IF line would determine which band was active. Thus I could hop from 902.080 to 1296.080 by flipping the coax switch. I am sure this is sounding like very novice stuff to many, but to me it was one of the best lessons learned this rove.

-- K2EZ