2009 ARRL January VHF Sweepstakes
03/16/2009 |
W9SZ
To start off, I think I have convinced most people that I am stark, staring mad. At least my non-ham friends now believe this! I think a lot of ham friends now do, too.
The night before the contest I set up the 9-band station (144 thru 10368 MHz) in my car on shelves I built to set on the driver's seat. Station is completely homebrew by me including all antennas except for the IF rigs (two HTX-100's). One of them has been extensively modified to be a 144 MHz IF for the microwave gear. I drove to the hill in EN50rl I have been using for QRP Portable operation for a couple years and started to set up at about 2 PM CST (an hour after the contest had started). The temperature was 20 degrees and the wind was gusting up to 50 mph with blowing snow mixed in. I hadn't expected the wind or snow. It normally takes me an hour to get all the antennas set up but this time it took 2 1/2 hours. There are some things I just can't do with gloves on (like tiny screws and SMA connectors) and my fingers kept freezing, making frequent trips back into the car necessary to thaw them out. I think the wind chill factor was minus 20 degrees F.
Once I got everything set up, I had great difficulty getting anyone's attention with my 10 watts. Everyone except Bob K2DRH seemed to be ignoring my direction. My own antennas use "Armstrong" rotors and getting out to rotate the antennas was painful every time, with the 50 mph winds and the snow. I made a number of QSO's by about 9 pm but nowhere near what I had expected. The antennas were very difficult to keep under control and the antenna masts were thrashing around vertically as well as horizontally. I almost lost them several times. I did have the tripod with my dish for 2304-and-up blow over and it bent the dish. Fortunately it didn't damage the feed. I just took that part of the setup down for attempted repair later.
I decided Saturday night at about 9:30 pm to head into Gibson City, IL, about 10 miles east of where I was, to rent a motel room for the night. I secured the antennas the best I could and hoped they would stay up overnight. At the motel, I managed to bend the dish back into something pretty close to straight. I also recharged my battery. Seems they run down faster when the temperature is around freezing!
I got up the next morning at about 7 AM and made my way back to the hill. I think the temperature was about 15 degrees then and the wind was still bad, but not quite as bad. Maybe gusting to 35 mph. Being outside in it was still painful. The antennas had survived the night and I got everything set up again.
I managed to make some more QSO's on Sunday but it was rough. There were times when I sat for almost two hours without a QSO. My average number of QSO's was about 2 1/2 per hour when I figured it out later. I managed to make one QSO on 2304 and one on 3456 on Sunday with K2DRH. The people I usually work on 5760 and 10368 were nowhere to be found by me, so I didn't get to try those bands this time. Band conditions to me were pretty dismal for the entire time I participated in this contest; I have never seen them worse than this.
At about 4 pm I decided I'd had enough and packed everything up and headed home. It took as long to get the antennas down as it did to put them up.
A couple of notes I made to myself were: (1) Find some pens that write in temperatures below freezing. The typical ballpoint just won't do that; and (2) try to figure out how to keep the stakes that hold antenna mast guy ropes from freezing into the ground in winter operations. I managed to get them loose by putting on vise-grips and rotating while pulling till they came out.
When it was done, I'd made 36 QSO's total and had 1850 points. It took a couple days to recover from finger frostbite. I may or may not do this again; if we'd had phenomenal conditions like we did in the August UHF contest it would've been worth it. At least in June I don't have the same weather to contend with. Just thunderstorms and possible tornadoes.
73, Zack W9SZ -- W9SZ
The night before the contest I set up the 9-band station (144 thru 10368 MHz) in my car on shelves I built to set on the driver's seat. Station is completely homebrew by me including all antennas except for the IF rigs (two HTX-100's). One of them has been extensively modified to be a 144 MHz IF for the microwave gear. I drove to the hill in EN50rl I have been using for QRP Portable operation for a couple years and started to set up at about 2 PM CST (an hour after the contest had started). The temperature was 20 degrees and the wind was gusting up to 50 mph with blowing snow mixed in. I hadn't expected the wind or snow. It normally takes me an hour to get all the antennas set up but this time it took 2 1/2 hours. There are some things I just can't do with gloves on (like tiny screws and SMA connectors) and my fingers kept freezing, making frequent trips back into the car necessary to thaw them out. I think the wind chill factor was minus 20 degrees F.
Once I got everything set up, I had great difficulty getting anyone's attention with my 10 watts. Everyone except Bob K2DRH seemed to be ignoring my direction. My own antennas use "Armstrong" rotors and getting out to rotate the antennas was painful every time, with the 50 mph winds and the snow. I made a number of QSO's by about 9 pm but nowhere near what I had expected. The antennas were very difficult to keep under control and the antenna masts were thrashing around vertically as well as horizontally. I almost lost them several times. I did have the tripod with my dish for 2304-and-up blow over and it bent the dish. Fortunately it didn't damage the feed. I just took that part of the setup down for attempted repair later.
I decided Saturday night at about 9:30 pm to head into Gibson City, IL, about 10 miles east of where I was, to rent a motel room for the night. I secured the antennas the best I could and hoped they would stay up overnight. At the motel, I managed to bend the dish back into something pretty close to straight. I also recharged my battery. Seems they run down faster when the temperature is around freezing!
I got up the next morning at about 7 AM and made my way back to the hill. I think the temperature was about 15 degrees then and the wind was still bad, but not quite as bad. Maybe gusting to 35 mph. Being outside in it was still painful. The antennas had survived the night and I got everything set up again.
I managed to make some more QSO's on Sunday but it was rough. There were times when I sat for almost two hours without a QSO. My average number of QSO's was about 2 1/2 per hour when I figured it out later. I managed to make one QSO on 2304 and one on 3456 on Sunday with K2DRH. The people I usually work on 5760 and 10368 were nowhere to be found by me, so I didn't get to try those bands this time. Band conditions to me were pretty dismal for the entire time I participated in this contest; I have never seen them worse than this.
At about 4 pm I decided I'd had enough and packed everything up and headed home. It took as long to get the antennas down as it did to put them up.
A couple of notes I made to myself were: (1) Find some pens that write in temperatures below freezing. The typical ballpoint just won't do that; and (2) try to figure out how to keep the stakes that hold antenna mast guy ropes from freezing into the ground in winter operations. I managed to get them loose by putting on vise-grips and rotating while pulling till they came out.
When it was done, I'd made 36 QSO's total and had 1850 points. It took a couple days to recover from finger frostbite. I may or may not do this again; if we'd had phenomenal conditions like we did in the August UHF contest it would've been worth it. At least in June I don't have the same weather to contend with. Just thunderstorms and possible tornadoes.
73, Zack W9SZ -- W9SZ
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