12/09/2003 | K4FAU The decision to participate in this contest was made only 2 weeks before the contest after one of our members came across the Collegiate Championship www.collegiatechampionship.org web side. The Collegiate Championship is an Amateur Radio competition between college and university Amateur Radio clubs that takes place during the ARRL November Sweepstakes radio contest. The week before the contest Hank N3HV, Fred K9VV and Jeff AJ2U cleaned up the station at T6 and got it ready to operate. The only thing missing was a 40M antenna. Saturday of the contest Ed W1UY and Sjaak KG4PVX were the first to arrive. Together they put up a Delta 160M, 80M, 40M and 30M sloper. Minutes before the start of the contest Art AB4RL joined in and K4FAU was up and running in the contest.

We decided to take part as a Multi station to give non students and alumni a chance to operate. The ARRL rules for a school club are a bit too restrictive. Ed left not to long after the start of the contest. Art and Sjaak operated till about 7 pm and stopped for dinner. Around 8:30 pm John WD4V and Sjaak arrived back at T6 and started operating on 15M. After only a short time John had to leave and Robert KG4IMT joined Sjaak. At around 10pm Saturday Sjaak left for home and Robert continued to operate K4FAU deep in to the night on a good working 40 Sloper.

Sunday morning Jeff used the station for 2 hours as ????? with Sal N4YQU as a onlooker. When it was time for Sal to get behind the mike he suddenly remembered that his XYL had some errants for him to run......... Sjaak arrived early afternoon at T6 together and with Jeff tried to get the Alpha 78 amplifier to work. After some time looking for the TX cable (Hank had arrived in the mean time) the decision was made to keep running "barefoot" 100 Watt.

Sjaak took the controls again of the station to put a couple more calls in the log for K4FAU. After 3 difficult contacts (into CA,PA and TX) Sjaak discovered that the TX power of the radio was only 5 Watts! Jeff had turned the power down in order to hookup the amp. With the power backup to 100 Watt Sjaak continued until there were 101 contacts in the log. Jeff had left and Sal returned back to T6 when it was time for Sjaak to leave. After initial problems figuring out the logging software Sal and Hank put another 20 some stations in the log. Robert was the last person on Sunday to put a couple of entries in the log for our ARRL SS effort.

Our first contest effort (besides Field Day) proved to be fun. Even tough we won't make the top of the list we learned a lot and I am sure we can and will do better in future contests.

Thanks go out to (in order of appearance) Hank N3HV, Fred K9VV, Jeff AJ2U, Ed W1UY, Sjaak KG4PVX, Art AB4RL, John WD4V, Robert KG4IMT and Sal N4YQU -- KG4PVX