06/16/2008 | WB2AMU I knew beforehand that I would have some issues putting in a much time in for this contest in the QRP portable category because of several family events going on during this weekend, such as graduations, parties and Father's Day. So for the June VHF contest this year, I decided to do something very different from previous years where instead of driving to a 250 foot hill about 15 minutes away in my area in FN30 on Long Island, I chose a park and ride parking lot that was less than five minutes from my house. The lot was located in the plains of Patchogue and roughly at 50 feet ASL. I knew that with the difference in height from the other QTH, that my line-of-sight QSOs would suffer on some of the bands such as 432 MHz and 220 MHz. Indeed, I would not complete any 220 MHz FM QSOs for this event.

But I knew that the odds of Sporadic-E was good, so my main effort of focus would be on Six Meters. Saturday was almost a complete wash in terms of available time as well as activity. My main effort began on Sunday morning at 6 AM where I completed about a dozen QSOs, including two fairly long-range QSOs with K3YTL (FN11) and K8GP (FM08) on Two Meters while using a three element beam on fifteen feet of mast sections in an umbrella stand. My Six Meter beam was situated on a tripod that was placed on my car's roof. I took a break to do some errands and came back to the lot at 11 AM where the band was opened to the Florida area. I found decent success on CW, completing several QSOs into EL87, EL79, EL96 and EM70 areas, along with a few other grids. I then went out to dinner for Father's Day for about four hours. I found out later that the band was opened for much of the day into the south from my area but there was rapid fading effects. After dinner, I went back to the lot and had about two more hours of activity into the southern states with many of the contacts made using SSB. Sometimes signals would drop out in the middle of a QSO but they would come back later in many cases.

Overall, I found this a nice change of pace, where the location was a bit more challenging in terms of height but the presense of Sporadic-E on Six Meters compensated for that. The park and ride lot was very quiet during the weekends and I had nobody bother me at all! A fun event for me this year in FN30! -- WB2AMU