Geez the fun just never ends. I got back home in early Dec from the Keys to discover that despite making arraignments to have my main tower fixed by the time I got back, it wasn’t, and the 6M arrays on both towers as well as 2304 were kaput. The custom made part needed to fix my worn out guy ring was at least finally fabricated after 4 months of problems and delays. I arraigned some tower help and we managed to cut the old part out and replace it a few days after I got back.

I fixed the 2x11 6M array on the main 6M tower and the 2304 problem. I found about 2” of water in the 8x7 array tower relay/match Stackmaster box that had just been repaired about a year earlier from the lightning strike and apparently had not had the gaskets replaced. I sent it out for repair again and it sat there until two days before the contest when they finally looked at it and almost all the relays were shot, as well as some positions on the expensive new shack controller that I’d had to replace last year. But they could sell me a whole new system. Needless to say I’m not thrilled about that.

The Contest itself was anticlimactic. I never worked anyone on 2304. In fact I only even found one rover and one fixed station that even had it, but both were too far away for conditions. Two meters was suppressed all weekend and 222 and 432 were much better bands. The temperatures dipped down to the minus regions the day of the contest and the insulator noise was horrendous, especially to the west. It quit the last 15 minutes of the contest. The big rain/snow mix that occurred on Friday must have iced up a lot of stations in MI, IN and OH because I hardly heard any of them. It also kept most of the rovers home. No real 6M Es and no enhancement. Just a real January grind.

On a positive note the new version of WSJTX seems to fix the problems were have seen with contest mode and rovers. I used it a lot to drive up my grid total. It’s still difficult to pry local stations off 6M digital and get them to QSY to other bands, but we seem to be making some progress there.

73 de Bob2 K2DRH