2006 ARRL September VHF Contest
09/12/2006 |
K
What happened to our "Contest Es"? Well as far as that is concerned, what happen to the tropo? 33 degrees Saturday morning didn't help I'm sure.
From 160 miles north of Minneapolis/St Paul Minnesota the contest was a real struggle. There is no question that both the activity and conditions were more like a January contest than September. I only had one new personal high and that was due to Gary WHZ and Jon KQA being so kind as to take their 10Ghz portables with them when they went to a hamfest Saturday morning. On the return trip back to MSP they stopped in EN36 and EN35 at points about 65miles away and we had nice contacts on 10Ghz. Contacts from EN36 were CW and S1, but the EN35 path was 5-9 SSB! That was MUCH stronger than the 2m liaison. Those combined with two tropo contacts in EN34 160 miles away provided 3 grids and 6 contacts on 10Ghz, a contest high for me! Thanks guys.
Counts on all other bands were down from normal September contest's. 26% of my contacts were with rovers. 11% contacts were from my "rare" EN37! I only worked Dan NRW on 2m and Bob K2DRH and I came up empty on 432. These guys are "normally" clean sweeps 50-432mhz from EN37ed-EN41.
I heard many fellows complaining about QRN. I too had power line QRN popup Saturday and it was S7 looking SW and NE. The blanker in the 6m station allowed some Qs with the QRN, but the NB in 746Pro could not handled the noise. The Softrock based 28/144Mhz receiver/IF running Power SDR software with it's software noise blankers allowed several 2m contacts that would have been lost otherwise, just turned down the 746 audio.
I did less calling on 2m during the contest and mostly watched the SDReceiver panagraph (Rocky software) and pounced. Being able to watch 144.180 - 144.270 Mhz allowed very good rover activity tracking in particular. Much of the rover activity was again out of range, but I feel very good about the rover count in this contest.
Thanks to all that scheduled with me and thanks to those that looked this way for all the Qs. 80 Grids were worked and 169 contacts, the bands operated 50,144,222,432,1296 and 10Ghz. Now I need to charge the batteries for the 10Ghz portable for this weekend ...more "radio fun"! -- K
From 160 miles north of Minneapolis/St Paul Minnesota the contest was a real struggle. There is no question that both the activity and conditions were more like a January contest than September. I only had one new personal high and that was due to Gary WHZ and Jon KQA being so kind as to take their 10Ghz portables with them when they went to a hamfest Saturday morning. On the return trip back to MSP they stopped in EN36 and EN35 at points about 65miles away and we had nice contacts on 10Ghz. Contacts from EN36 were CW and S1, but the EN35 path was 5-9 SSB! That was MUCH stronger than the 2m liaison. Those combined with two tropo contacts in EN34 160 miles away provided 3 grids and 6 contacts on 10Ghz, a contest high for me! Thanks guys.
Counts on all other bands were down from normal September contest's. 26% of my contacts were with rovers. 11% contacts were from my "rare" EN37! I only worked Dan NRW on 2m and Bob K2DRH and I came up empty on 432. These guys are "normally" clean sweeps 50-432mhz from EN37ed-EN41.
I heard many fellows complaining about QRN. I too had power line QRN popup Saturday and it was S7 looking SW and NE. The blanker in the 6m station allowed some Qs with the QRN, but the NB in 746Pro could not handled the noise. The Softrock based 28/144Mhz receiver/IF running Power SDR software with it's software noise blankers allowed several 2m contacts that would have been lost otherwise, just turned down the 746 audio.
I did less calling on 2m during the contest and mostly watched the SDReceiver panagraph (Rocky software) and pounced. Being able to watch 144.180 - 144.270 Mhz allowed very good rover activity tracking in particular. Much of the rover activity was again out of range, but I feel very good about the rover count in this contest.
Thanks to all that scheduled with me and thanks to those that looked this way for all the Qs. 80 Grids were worked and 169 contacts, the bands operated 50,144,222,432,1296 and 10Ghz. Now I need to charge the batteries for the 10Ghz portable for this weekend ...more "radio fun"! -- K
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