2007 ARRL January VHF Sweepstakes
01/29/2007 |
W9SZ
W9SZ Single-Op Portable
Everything seemed to be going for me at the start. The weather was about the best I could expect for January, there was no snow or ice on the ground, the wind was dead calm and it even warmed up above freezing on Saturday! I got everything set up well before the contest started; I even had an hour to spare.
All equipment and antennas are homebrew except for the 2 HTX-100 IF rigs. One of those has a 144 MHz transverter built in for use as a microwave IF. Power was 10 watts from 144 through 1296 MHz and 1 watt for the microwave bands. You can see the mast-mounted transverters with the loop yagis for 903 and 1296 in the photo.
I can usually hear the 903 and 1296 beacons of K3SIW from this QTH and
sometimes the 2304 beacon. On Saturday the 903 and 1296 beacons were just in and out of the noise and I heard nothing on the 2304 frequency. That wasn't a good sign.
Conditions on 144, 222 and 432 seemed marginal to me; I did hear many
people on 144 that didn't hear me. I always liken VHF contesting to two ships passing in the night; if you don't have your beams pointed at each other you probably won't make a QSO, especially if one of you is QRP.
The farmer who owns the hill I was on came up to chat in the afternoon on Saturday and said we were supposed to get 3 to 5 inches of snow that night. I decided to tear down at about 10 pm. It was still fairly warm and there was still no wind or precipitation and I didn't even get frostbite this year! I got home shortly after midnight and we got about 2 to 3 inches of snow overnight. I saw there was some sporadic-E on Saturday on 6 meters and I was tempted to drive back to the hill with just 6 meters but didn't. Hopefully I didn't miss too much!
A company is building windmill generators near my site. They have about 120 of them to the southwest a few miles and will have a total of over 300 of the monsters in the area when they get done. If you look closely at the horizon on the right in my Setup photo you might see some of them.
73, Zack -- W9SZ
Everything seemed to be going for me at the start. The weather was about the best I could expect for January, there was no snow or ice on the ground, the wind was dead calm and it even warmed up above freezing on Saturday! I got everything set up well before the contest started; I even had an hour to spare.
All equipment and antennas are homebrew except for the 2 HTX-100 IF rigs. One of those has a 144 MHz transverter built in for use as a microwave IF. Power was 10 watts from 144 through 1296 MHz and 1 watt for the microwave bands. You can see the mast-mounted transverters with the loop yagis for 903 and 1296 in the photo.
I can usually hear the 903 and 1296 beacons of K3SIW from this QTH and
sometimes the 2304 beacon. On Saturday the 903 and 1296 beacons were just in and out of the noise and I heard nothing on the 2304 frequency. That wasn't a good sign.
Conditions on 144, 222 and 432 seemed marginal to me; I did hear many
people on 144 that didn't hear me. I always liken VHF contesting to two ships passing in the night; if you don't have your beams pointed at each other you probably won't make a QSO, especially if one of you is QRP.
The farmer who owns the hill I was on came up to chat in the afternoon on Saturday and said we were supposed to get 3 to 5 inches of snow that night. I decided to tear down at about 10 pm. It was still fairly warm and there was still no wind or precipitation and I didn't even get frostbite this year! I got home shortly after midnight and we got about 2 to 3 inches of snow overnight. I saw there was some sporadic-E on Saturday on 6 meters and I was tempted to drive back to the hill with just 6 meters but didn't. Hopefully I didn't miss too much!
A company is building windmill generators near my site. They have about 120 of them to the southwest a few miles and will have a total of over 300 of the monsters in the area when they get done. If you look closely at the horizon on the right in my Setup photo you might see some of them.
73, Zack -- W9SZ
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