06/17/2009 | W1RT/R The Intergalactic Roving Battle Jitney aka Luxury Rover manned by W1RT and ON4IY set out from the lovely Blue Ridge Motel in Front Royal (complete with museum-quality 50's art-deco furnishings) and headed for our FM18 start. Conditions right from the start seemed flat to negative on the upper bands, but a couple hours later when up on Hogback in FM08 we got some of the 6 meter E popping up which enhanced the grid total nicely. The rest of the evening was unfortunately consumed by traveling to a crappy FM09 site and a less productive than usual visit to Big Mountain in FM19. A 4 hour nap in Chambersburg and a 2 hour high-speed run to Hazleton got us to Pismire Ridge in FN10 where upper bands continued to be crappy. A new site in FN11 didn't work out so we had to substitute a roadside stop, and Pimple Hill was closed off so we went up and visited W3CCX on Hogback and grabbed a few FN21 q's. Heading towards home, we visited the Alamuchy rest area and ran into the roving trio of K1DS, KB3GJT and KB3NRL (all /R) which resulted in an unexpected 10-band run in FN20. We made another FN20 stop at a site new to us .. Eagle Rock south of Newark, with an awesome view of the entire length of the island of Manhattan. Fought through the I95 traffic into Englewood and over the local roads to the Palisades Parkway for FN30, and finally home to FN31 on Tashua Hill for a very frantic and productive 45 final minutes.

We did have two relay failures .. 3G up at the top of the mast had us down 20-30 db easy, and the IF select relay in my 5/10 box got stuck on 10G so we had to temporarily remote the 5G IF input to an extra cable and change bands by switching the bnc from one connector to the other. Almost had a major disaster when the 1296 and 2G loopers got loose and swung around 90 degrees .. I don't know how I didn't whack them on something. Other than that things worked pretty well.

Score exceeds our previous best .. 452 q's and 130 grids for around 130K total -- W1RT