01/23/2007 | N5AC Wow ... I thought the guys in the northeast had it bad in January with all the cold weather... we had just finished an ice storm and Friday/Saturday it was in the 30s and rainy. As I tried in desperation to get all of the equipment running, water poured over me and all the equipment. Since I had several large PAs this time, I ran a generator to supplement the 275A alternator so I had rain and 110V in the back of the truck ...

Jim, WD5IYT, headed up on Friday and helped me get everything running and then we were joined at the house by K5FOG and WD0ACD who roved in the ACD rover. Jim was a blast to rove with and was a big help with repairs, tools and skilled 4WD driving. We all had a blast and most everything worked from 6m to 3456. 10G was out due to a fried LO, a preamp that makes +6dBm on 10.4G (all by itself!!) and a slot antenna full of water. Note to self: seal slot antennas or mount upside-down.

Our prelim plan was to head to EM32 in the morning Sat and drive across EM22,12,02 and end up there for the evening (hitting EM33,23,13 and 03 en route). But we didn't even get away from the house in EM13 before 3PM due to the weather. That's the bad news.

The good news is with help from my roving partner we got everything running. K5FOG and I wrote some specialized rover logging software so we can now log twice as fast as we can make contacts. The software auto updates grids and allows a single touch on the touch screen to log a contact with the most popular 8 contacts on any of 10 bands. We can literally run eight bands with one person in under a minute and have the contacts logged.

We ran 100W of 6m, 350W on 2m, 100W on 220 (we think), 30W on 432 (blown PA switching), 250W on 902, 120W on 1296, 180W on 2304 and 50W on 3456. We blew a 3456 front end and had to replace an MGA 86576 on the side of the road in 40-degree weather (see photo with massive soldering iron). HEY -- it worked... The voltage differential between transverter and PA kept keying things abnormally so that was sort-of fixed (note to self: all PAs and transverters get switched via a dedicated relay from this point forward). One mis-connection shorted my control system output transistor and required a set of wires running to the front of the truck to key 2304 on TX (note to self: install current-limiting resistors on all control system output transistors). WD5IYT aptly dubbed this PTT arrangement "solder to transmit."

Ended up with around 60K points -- we had a great time. At one point, Greg's rover (WD0ACD) was parked a ways down from us and we were shooting East to K5QE across a highway. As Greg sent out dashes on 2304, we listened. As cars passed in front of the rigs, we hear the multipath with doppler return in addition to the fundamental -- sounded pretty neat. I gave Greg a call on the comm channel when he was done and asked him to send dashes and I played him back on 440 FM and he got to hear as a car passed -- I looked over and I was getting a big thumbs up. We decided that calculating the speed of the car based on the frequency shift would be left as "an exercise to the reader."

I attempted to use WSJT on 6m FSK441 but I had no luck. Once I saw "N4SIKX,EM42" and thought for sure I had something, but never saw anything like that again. I need to get some real instruction on this stuff...

So in spite of the horrible wx on Saturday, it was Beautiful on Sunday and we had a great rove. Thanks to those fixed stations that kept tabs on us: NM5M, WB5ZDP, K5VH, K5LLL, K5QE, W3XO/5

This rove made possible by The All-American Rejects and Move Along, the unofficial rover theme song:
Move along, move along like I know you do /
And even when your hope is gone /
Move along, move along just to make it through /
Move along /
Move along

73, Steve -- N5AC