The half inch or more of radial ice that happened twice during some very unusual rainy February thaws followed by quick temperature drops and windy days didn’t destroy much of the VHF stuff (HF was another story), though the falling ice did mash up a lot of the loops on the microwave loop yagis. And I finally got the 6M Stackmaster rebuilt and put back up, hopefully to leak no more after filling it up with water before the January test. Array Solutions took over 3 months to get it back to me. It was originally a custom build and Jay didn’t want to rebuild it, but rather sell me his new cascaded HF Stackmatch off-the-shelf solution for 4 antennas that would have had more than 3x the loss of the old box on 6M. Needless to say I didn’t like that idea very much, so he quoted me a repair price equal to the new system cost and I guess he was surprised that I agreed to it, but I really had little choice to get the performance I needed unless I wanted to build my own. It does work perfectly so I’m happy with it.

It never ceases to amaze me how everything can be working fine before the contests, then suddenly all go to hell. But 10 days before the test the 902 antennas were hanging down after a stacking frame bracket broke in high winds. Had to fab a new one and somehow broke my preamp again when I put it all back together the Sunday before the test. My rotor for the tower top had been stopping randomly for no apparent reason so I looked at that too, and when I opened the brush ports on the motor greasy water poured out. It has been a very rainy and windy spring so the motor was full of water, amazing that it worked at all. I was able to flush it all out with spray cleaner/degreaser and get it working well gain. Took over 5 hours on the tower to fix those issues. But it all had to get done that day since we had to fly out to NYC for a family funeral the next day and would not be back until the evening before the contest. Didn’t get good sleep all week (a motel next to LI Expressway in Queens isn’t like sleeping in the country) and of course we hit delays on the way back, so when I woke up early on Saturday morning and started to get the station ready for the contest I was still very tired.

Powering up, testing and reconnecting all the stuff takes some time, but I hoped it would go quickly. No chance. Of course all the computers needed updating, N1MM wanted to update and WSJT X didn’t work at all because I had the new FT4 release candidate loaded. To make things worse the internet was bogged down and intermittent (they finally fixed it the Monday after the test). I had to reload programs, drivers and reprogram CAT ports and stuff, and it felt like I was drowning in computer madness. This radio hobby gets more like a computer hobby every day! But I got it all together (at least well enough so most of what I wanted was working) literally minutes before the test feeling even more tired than when I went to bed the night before. Time to contest! Threw some water on my face and choked down some lunch. Can’t say I was at my best.

Luckily it started out slow so I was able to warm up into it. The second hour had a little Es boost (EA8DBM came up in my pile) but the east coasters must have been DXing or FT8 droning because they didn’t call in like I would have hoped. Started looking for the rovers and staying off FT8 since it would likely put me to sleep. Most of the day was very slow with few stations on 2M calling and I started to snipe some grids off 6M FT8 and move them the best I could to other bands. It’s like pulling teeth! It used to be that stations would start tuning 2M when 6 was not open. Now they just stay on 6M FT8 hoping to catch some rare bubble and keep working each other 50-100 miles away while just ignoring the other bands. This is folly if you really want to do well in the contest. I’ve proven over and over that this is NOT a 6M contest and you can’t win it by staying on 6M no matter how good it gets. Now they flock to 6M no matter how bad it gets!

It was mostly terrible Saturday afternoon here with spotty Es openings to the NE and east that would last a few minutes then die. Finally at about 7PM it ripped open to the FN/FM grids and I got some decent rate for the next two hours. Too bad that’s the evening time when stations would traditionally get on 2M and run the bands with you (but with FT8 who knows). When it died down I really hit the wall of weariness from the past week.

I started to do meteor scatter early since 2M was a wasteland and that seemed to pay off in multipliers although by the time midnight rolled around and I had my skeds I was so tired I was fumbling like a stooge. Seemed like my radios or computers kept jumping freq and offsetting me a little (known Flex/WSJT bug). WSJT suddenly decided I needed a 50 Hz ftol for some reason (known bug). WSJT also reverts back to a default mode freq if you change anything in settings. My DAX kept going south deteriorating my digital audio (another known Flex bug). It was windy and my power line noise to the west prevented me from running a lot of 2M skeds that way. Even got on the wrong 2M freq for 5 mins with K1TEO before I realized what I was doing. Freaking nightmare! I stayed up until 1AM with sked requests still pouring in on PJ but I was a zombie and just couldn’t handle any more.

Woke up at 6AM better rested but still not nearly 100%. Did some more MSK-144 and got ready for my sked with K0AWU 400 miles away. We made it on 6M and 2M CW then went to JT65b for 222 like we usually do. It was obvious he was not seeing me. I checked things out and there was a burnt smell coming from the transverter. Told him to quit and investigated but couldn’t see anything. Got a cable and a meter and had no output. OK, got a spare transverter that had been fixed and jacked it in. No output. Huh? Then investigated and realized the coax jumper I was using was bad. Now we have output! Was going to put the first one back in but said hey, this works so leave it alone! No time to waste troubleshooting further. Of course the crystal was way off frequency, but that was easy to compensate for. Small but annoying equipment issue kept popping up all day and resolving themselves. At one point my Flex 6700 locked up in the middle of a band run with a rover and had to be rebooted!

Sunday was slow pretty much all day long but I was able to gain some ground on Sunday afternoon when folks finally got bored working each other 50 miles away on 6M FT8 and went to 2M SSB. There were some brief flashes of Es off and on all afternoon and a pretty short but decent one to FL, but hardly anyone was on SSB. I had to get on ON4KST and drag a couple stations over to SSB but never really got anything going. Meanwhile 50.313 was lit up like a Christmas tree with 20 over stuff saturating receivers and yet the slugs were so entrenched there they didn’t react and never moved! Most of the time I was in and out of internet connectivity so that didn’t help me much either.

There was some to DM and DN and such for a while and W9RM was huge from DM58. All the while the FT8 drones stuck to their madness with the associated insane RX blocking. There was one short opening where TX came in and true to form everyone in TX was loud and running but nobody was answering my CQs. I still maintain that it must be illegal to S&P on 6M from TX! I wasn’t paying attention but I bet they won’t even do it on FT8! I had to grid hunt and know that I missed some of the usual suspects since it was spotlight prop and moving around so much. Up to the last hour the SW was hot and it double hop extended weakly to CA and the PNW at times, but really rapidly changing places all the time. Not a lot of rate but a lot of grids! Stations kept obliviously grinding on FT8 like it was crack, so I sniped several new grids there whenever it got slow and I saw them. I estimate I worked maybe 40-50 stations total on FT8 all day.

For the last couple of hours 6M Es died off into the weak bursts that FT8 is actually good for and the last hour was actually pretty dead, but I did find a lot of multipliers on band runs, ones that should have been in the log already since they were pretty common grids out 200 miles or so but the stations had apparently been too caught up with their shiny new FT8 toy. All evening it seemed really busy to me running bands, but the ratemeter says otherwise so I was probably beyond exhausted at that point.

At the end I was absolutely amazed to see I had reached 200K, exactly! Never had that happen before! Too bad when I looked over the log I discovered a station logged on the wrong band and I had to mess that perfect number up. Oh well, even if I don’t make a mistake someone always seems to forget to log one of our QSOs during a band run and I lose points that way anyway! Pretty disgusted that I found only 1 station on 2304 to even try with and only one on 3456 that I could work!

73 de Bob2 K2DRH