10/20/2008 | W0JT It seemed like lately I had been spending my every waking hour at the hospital where I work, two stories underground, far from the sunshine and fresh air for which Minnesota is famous. After missing most of Field Day, the June VHF contest, and the August UHF contest, and some spectacular 50 MHz E-skip opportunities from the midwest to Europe earlier this summer, I vowed to at least get out for both weekends of the 10 GHz and Up Cumulative Contest this year. I think I got more sunshine and fresh air in those two weekends alone than I did for the entire rest of this summer! And let me assure you, it was a grand time.

For the August weekend, even though I managed to avoid working either Saturday or Sunday, work committments until late on the preceding Friday and early the following Monday meant that I had to operate from close to home. My home location itself is out of the question, because it is a heavily wooded neighborhood surrounded by ridges of several hundred feet of elevation in most directions. The only 10 GHz contacts I've ever managed to make from there have been one shot bounced off nearby buildings to another ham a few blocks away, and a few snowscatter shots to Bloomington and Minneapolis in a January VHF contest. No, home is not the place for me to be in the 10 GHz contest. So I joined a bunch of friends from the Northern Lights Radio Society (N0KP, K0KFC, KD0JI, WA0SSN, W0GHZ, WB0VHF, KC0IJB, KC0IYT, N0UK, and K0HAC) on the summit of Buck Hill, a ski hill in Burnsville, Minnesota, a few miles from my home in Apple Valley. Buck Hill is not terribly high, but it is noticeably higher than the immediately surrounding terrain, so there are pretty good takeoffs to the horizon in most directions. Unfortunately, since the hill is used for snow skiing in the winter months, the very top of the hill is "cluttered" with the ski jump ramp, the building that houses the machinery that operates the chair lift, etc. Oh well, nothing's perfect, but we found good spots to work in the directions we needed to shoot. As the fixed stations, we had a fairly relaxed operating atmosphere. Although we made a few contacts with other fixed stations at sizeable distances away (N0AKC, KM0T, K0MHC), some other such attempts (K0AWU, K2YAZ, K2DRH) were not as successful. But we kept pretty busy working a "rover pack" that was roaming around southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa. We made numerous contacts with this group of rovers (WA2VOI/0, W0ZQ, KC0P, WB0LJC, and W9FZ) from Buck Hill over distances that ranged from 122 to 260 Km. One of us would listen for the rovers to reach a new spot and start beaconing towards us, and as soon as their dits and dahs were heard, we'd jump into action, get netted up on frequency, beacon back so everyone could optimize their dish pointing, and then make our exchanges in rapid-fire succession. Then, a 30 to 60 minute pause while the rovers repositioned, to work on my tan and resume reading a novel. (It was decadent, but I felt like I deserved it!) Nearly all the contacts with the rover pack were made on SSB. To round out the first weekend, we also had some visits to "the hill" by the relatively infrequent 10 GHz operators KB0OZN and K0JSP, and we also managed to entice N0HJZ to shut off his HF rig for part of the weekend and roam the nearby countryside with a loaner 10 GHz rig, which was equipped with a simple 17 dB horn instead of a more cumbersome dish. With the simpler radio setup and his relative inexperience with 10 GHz rover operations, he stayed within about 50 Km of Buck Hill, but he and we were grateful for the opportunity to get him involved.

For the second (September) weekend, I managed to extricate myself even further from work responsibilities, so that I could spend that weekend with the rover pack instead of the Buck Hill Gang. For the September weekend, the rover pack went to southwest Minnesota, concentrating on the area near the Buffalo Ridge. As the name implies, this is an area where the terrain has a bit higher elevation, to facilitate finding decent paths back to the fixed stations. At each stop, we worked all available operators on Buck Hill, and at many of the stops, if the takeoff in other directions permitted, we also made QSO's with K0MHC at his home location, and KM0T (in between his parental duties). As before, the rover pack followed a looping path that worked mostly further from the south metropolitan Twin Cities on Saturday and moved generally back towards the metro area on Sunday. During the September weekend, contacts were made between our rover pack and the fixed stations over distances that ranged from 107 to 271 Km. By the time the sun set on Sunday, we were pretty beat, and still had a few hours' drive to get back home. But it was well worth the effort.

I had a great time both weekends, and really enjoyed the company of all the NLRS folks. The weather conditions were basically outstanding (plenty of warm sunshine, cool modest breezes, no precipitation). All you could ask for would have been a little better propagation during the mid-day lull.

Although my QSO count and total points fell short of my best numbers in 2005 by around 30-40%, it was still an outrageously fun pair of weekends, and I'm already looking forward to next year. By then, I hope to have upgraded my system with an 8 watt PA and a GPS-disciplined OCXO locked synthesized LO board that I picked up last weekend at Microwave Update 2008!

73 for now -- W0JT