01/20/2003 | AA1YN Saturday was dismal, very little activity, cold temperatures (-10F), equipment breakage, and very high electrical interference kept my score down. By midnight, I only had 4000 points. Just before the contest, I blew the receive IF attenuator in my 903 transverter. Up the tower to retrieve it, fix it and get it back up by noon. Add a few station controls and a coil of RG58 to attenuate the drive to my 2mtr amp for low power and I'm ready. Then at the start of the contest, I knew there was something wrong with my 432 transverter as I could only hear the strongest of signals. Another trip up the tower at 4PM to retrieve it. I didn't worry about fixing it until 11PM. The receive IF amp was dead and I didn't have a spare MAV-11 mmic. Having attended the Microwave Update last fall, I got a handful of MAR-6 mmics so I put one of those in and adjusted its bias resistor for 20ma. By 10AM Sunday, it had warmed up to +5F so up the tower again. By 2PM, the points were looking ok but not the best. Grab a few zzzz's and back at it at 4. Then came the blessing - a weak E Skip on 6 which lasted 1.5 hrs! It was better than last years F2 for me. Now I've got my 2002 score beat. Feeling a little better about the contest, I decided to persevere. I kept picking up a few new grids here and there up the bands and my score started to add up. One more contact and I've got my best VHF score beat! VE2XX in FN25 came back to add a new grid on 2 and pushed me over. I kept picking up new contacts and working up the bands. One more contact to break 22K - then 23K - then 24K. Now one more contact and I can break 25000 - WA3U in FM29 - new grid! Add a few more just in case I've messed up on a couple of entries and it's 11PM. 25872 is not a bad score. Its certainly in the class with WA1T and AC1J but a long way to go even to come close to AF1T. You have to know its AF1Ts fault I'm in this VHF mess in the first place. Now I have to figure how I'm going to beat this score. Big thanks to NS1O for loaning me his FT817 and to all those who I worked in the contest. -- AA1YN