01/20/2009 | K2DRH I approached this January VHF Contest with dread. The station was working well except for an intermittent on 6M that worked fine on transmit and would give me a normal SWR, but would attenuate the receive signal about 50% of the time until I transmitted again. The weather has been active here in the Midwest with unusual amounts of snow and nasty ice storms. A trip up the tower over the one nice day during the Christmas holiday weekend was necessary anyway to clear icicles off the microwave looper feeds and to unbend several crushed loops from falling ice again. This is beginning to be a January habit!

I thought 6M was in the rotor loop jumper again so I went up a new one. It would be easy to find since I had labeled all the coax by band with a Sharpie permanent marker on labeling ty-wraps the last time I replaced them. Well, so-called permanent marker ink weathers off ty-wraps pretty much within a year, so I was left with a lot of blank labels! I had to go up and down the top tower sections several times to isolate the 6M coax. While replacing the jumper I inadvertently unscrewed the F/F N bullet from the main tower connector. It was a good thing I did, because the stationary 7/8 hardline connector was definitely corroded despite a good weather seal. Apparently when the rotor loop kinked after the rebuilt motor ran backwards a year ago, water had leaked inside the center and migrated down to the hardline connector. Id missed it by not removing the N bullet then. Lesson learned, just because the top of an N bullet looks good it doesnt necessarily mean that the bottom does too!

I had another N bullet, spare half inch superflex connectors, solvent and tools to clean connectors in my bucket, but no 7/8 connector or tools to remove it. Of course, by the time I found it my fingers were pretty well frozen and the sun was going down so I cleaned it the best I could and resolved to replace it another day since I had a few weeks to contest time. It was not to be. Between high winds, work issues, a bout with the flu and the extreme cold WX (minus 31F) before the contest there was no way to get to it in time. It was working OK and only cut out maybe 10% of the time now, so I was a wimp and went with it. Of course later during the contest that 10% got worse and always seemed to happen whenever an extremely weak signal called. I swear it would time itself perfectly to cut out exactly the same part of the call I was missing each time!

Conditions were dismal at best. Ive never seen the Hepburn tropo forecast look so bleak before! Saturday was totally miserable with failures to normally workable stations on 903 and above the norm rather than the exception. The almost 60 degree temperature swing (minus 31 to plus 28 in one day) made all the power pole insulators sing in harmony! Id love to list highlights, but there really were none, with the notable exception of finding KB9C/R (W9FZ/R in disguise) in all four grids, however we stil missed a lot of the higher bands due to conditions. You know its bad when you cant work Bruce on 903 or 1296 at only 225 miles out! He was the one and only rover I worked all contest!

So the rovers mostly stayed home and the NAQP kept a lot of the others busy. I find it ridiculous that the ARRL would sponsor two contests the same weekend (NCJ is an ARRL publication) and I believe that this makes Saturday participation much lower than it could be. Many good VHF stations here in the MW will pass on the normally slow January VHF Sweepstakes in favor of the faster moving NAQP. They are not mutually exclusive! After all, contesters are adrenaline junkies who would much rather run a pileup than suffer through a 10 QSO hour!

Saturday was just awful. It never feels good to go to the WSJT skeds with only 170 Qs in the log. Fortunately the rox were really good for January and the WSJT stuff went very well, with only one miss on 2M when the 6M sked took way longer than it should have due to a major clock error. The multis seem to be famous for poorly adjusted clocks, but most times its only a few seconds off. This time it seems that one op was transmitting for 2/3 of its time on the wrong sequence and only getting about 10 out of 30 seconds of the Tx and listening time it should have! I manually sequenced so we had better odds and we finally completed on 6M, but by then it was too far into our allotted time slot to have any hope of working 2M before my next sked. I sent fix clock instead of QSY 2M and I hope they saw and understood it, otherwise all their other skeds probably went badly. Misadjusted clocks really mess up the Rx sequence of other stations in your area when you are on the call freq as well as reducing your chances of getting a random QSO going!

I stayed up an hour later than Id planned working random WSJT, mainly due to the totally depressing score at that point. Made up for it a bit by working Fred N1DPM on randoms, so I could at least set the alarm forward a half hour since I didnt have to meet him in the morning at 1200Z. But I accidentally turned off the alarm when I reset the time, so I overslept and missed my morning sked with K0AWU at 1230Z. Sorry Bill, my fault entirely! At least I got some extra sleep! I was 10 minutes late for a 1300Z sked with K2YAZ to try and recover the bands we couldnt work Saturday due to conditions. Things were not much better Sunday morning and only slightly improved during the afternoon. It would take that mornings sked and 2 more in the afternoon and evening to finally work Bob up to 3456, my only 8 band sweep of the contest!

Participation was MUCH better Sunday morning even though conditions were still pretty dismal. The pinpoint Es opening on 6M around 1400-1530Z into ME and Canada was both unexpected and fun. Lefty K1TOL was 60 over for an hour. He pegged the meter even with all my IF attenuation in, and was melting down my front end! I suspect that the bad connector was rectifying and making things a lot worse too. Everyone I heard was at least 40 over except for the few that called me from a couple other New England grids further south that were a lot weaker. I called CQ in the only places I could squeeze, but the ultra strong signals from ME bracketing me were overwhelming and made receiving difficult. Despite how strong this opening was, I never heard any 2M Es though. Of course my CQs attracted more locals than DX. Picking them out of the intermod, then leaving 6M to run the bands was really hard! But many of them I knew I would never hear again and they offered a lot of points and mults where the 6M opening was very limited in scope. I lost my run freq every time and once landed back on 6M almost on top of K1TEO! Not a good place to be when you run low power hihi!

So the morning was busy, but then the football games came on and it dropped way off again. Even so, Qs were finally getting into the log. KB9C/R and I swept all four Sunday grids on our 7 mutual bands. By 0000Z things really picked up again. Many stations seemed to show up all at once. Im sorry if you called me and I missed you since I was hearing lots of stations call in the background but I couldnt move the antennas fast enough to get to you all as we QSYd through the bands with several stations at a time, all at different beam headings. Failed attempts at the higher bands with guys I can normally work pretty quickly there didnt help either.

Its definitely more fun, but its also somewhat disconcerting to suddenly have dozens of stations calling from all different directions at once when you are worn down from hours of dull daze CQing into mostly static and line noise, struggling to pull out every dit. Id really love to have some 2M fixed beams around the clock when this type of gang up happens since most of them are too far away even for an omni stack! There was so much going on all at once that I arrived at one high band makeup sked over 5 mins late and probably missed that station because he left. Another one I was on time for, but left after 5 mins since the pickins were way too good to wait any more than that!

As usual the end of the contest had some big surprises in store. Conditions suddenly improved dramatically to the south and K4EQH in EM54 at almost 500 miles came barreling in at 20 over! This duct only lasted for a few minutes but it was enough time that we took advantage of working on 432 and 6M too, but had to do both on CW because they were marginal at best! No other stations were heard (I sure miss Rex W5RCI SK already he would have been there from EM44 to take advantage of this duct plus he was a great friend). When Tom and I said 73 on 2M again about 10 minutes later he was almost down to the noise level. Making noise that way also produced some welcome last minute mults from W9RVG, KA9UVY and W9DRB. When the final bell rang I was amazed to see that I had done almost as well as last year when conditions were very much better!

Added some antenna photos just to give some perspective on the size of the VHF contest array. Folks sometimes wonder how K2DRH gets out so well on low power. The "secret" is all about these aluminium "amplifiers", both on TX and RX.
-- 73 de K2DRH