This was not the best ARRL Sweepstakes CW contest that W8EDU has put forth. We will not get any plaques or certificates for this one. W8EDU will not make the box or have any photos in QST. Nevertheless, Dan and I had some fun and made a few QSOs. 

The plan was a follows. Dan, W8RZ, was to take a load of equipment up to 9A Glennan on Friday and get things mostly wired together for the contest and report any problems. I was to start the contest at 5 PM Saturday and operate until ready for the off time on Sunday morning. Dan would come to the shack and open the bands Sunday morning, run rate and finish the sweep until I got there Sunday afternoon. We would switch off until the end of the contest at 10 PM Sunday. We would put the shack back together, haul our gear down, and be out before 11 PM with another plaque.   

Here's what really happened. 

Dan hauled his stuff to 9A on Friday and wired things together. He made a few QSOs to ensure that things were more or less working. So far, so good. I arrived at the shack Saturday afternoon and found that Dan and I had seriously miscommunicated the readiness of the station. The setup was hopeless, with no room at the operating position for any notebook computers. I had no choice but to start rewiring, finding new coax jumpers, tugging slack through the wires, until there was a workable operating position. By the time that I got the operating position going, I had lost the first 25 minutes of the contest. In November SS, the first hour is one of the most critical; losing the first 25 minutes of the contest puts the station at a score deficit that is unlikely to be recovered.   

After deep breathing and hydration, things headed in the right direction. I managed to get some rate going on 40 m and did reasonably well for the next few hours. I spent some time on 20 m working west coast. The tribander and 40 m beam were working famously. Since I was managing to keep the rate up on 40 m, I did not look at 80 m until the skimmers and spots showed that there was serious stuff to be worked on 80 m. I moved to 80 m at 2357Z (7:57 PM). When I put the rig on 80 m and switched the antennas to 80 m, I was hoping that my ears were wrong. There were no signals on the 80 m coax switch position.OKOKOK, this is not the time to panic (there will be plenty of time to panic later). I began the process of methodical troubleshooting to determine the root cause of there being no 80 m signals. After eliminating the coax jumpers, coax switches and operator error, I came to the conclusion that there was in fact no antenna on the other end of the 80 m coax wire. I looked outside, but it was pitch dark and I could not see whether there was an 80 m antenna on the tower or not. 80 m after dark is the band for SS, so I did what had to be done. I managed to load the 40 m beam on 80 m with the MT-3000A tuner. As long as I kept the output power below about 500 W, the tuner did not arc and spark over. For the rest of the night, I concentrated on 40 m to the extent possible to make rate, but did what had to be done to get the close in multipliers and QSOs on 80. I lost about 45 minutes of operating time hoping to get an 80 m antenna going.   

Make no mistake, the 40 m yagi is a miserable excuse for an antenna on 80 m.Running was almost impossible. S&P took several calls to get through and the exchanges frequently required fills for number or check. There is a good reason that Cushcraft does not advertise their 40-2CD as an 80 m antenna. It sucks on 80 m.   

I used HamCap/VOAprop to estimate the time when the bands would open to the west. HamCap said that 1300Z (8 AM) would be the right time to be on. Taking into account all of the accumulated unplanned off time, and reserving one 30 minute block of off time for a solar flare or amplifier flame-out, I calculated that I needed to log my last QSO during the 0815Z (3:15 AM) minute. I logged NP4Z at 0815Z, put the amp on standby, left the rest of the computers and gear ready for Dan, and went home. At the break, we were at 427 Qs and 72 sections. The eight missing sections were MO, MS, OK, NV, SK, MB, NT and NE.   

Dan made his first QSO at 1313Z (8:13 AM) on 40m. Dan had two great hours on 40m, then the rate fell off for no good reason. Dan hung in on 20 and 15 through the 17Z hour, then took off time. However, instead of a 30 minute off time, Dan took 50 minutes. This took another 20 minutes of operating time away. At that point, we had used 6:25 of off time, plus the 25 minute late start that I failed to properly count as non-operating time, leaving only 23:10 of possible operating time. To make matters worse, during the long off time the telnet connections to the DX Cluster network and Skimmer Servers stopped. I did not write detailed instructions on starting the connections, so Dan spent most of Sunday with no DX Cluster or skimmers.   

I arrived at the station around 3:30 PM on Sunday. After starting the DX Cluster and skimmer connections, Dan bagged section #79 (NT) on 15m at 2037Z (3:37 PM). I started to work on the non-existent 80m antenna. One of the dipole wires was broken and coiled on the roof. The balun was hanging by a rope from the tower top plate and had broken from blowing and swinging into the tower. To make a long story short, I taped the balun back together, measured and attached new antenna wires, made up a proper boom from which to hang the balun away from the tower, and installed everything just before dark.   

I hit 80m at 2309Z (6:09 PM) trying to make up for the lost time Saturday night. We needed NE for the sweep, but there was none to be found. Dan started doing QRZ.com lookups on every "0" that the skimmers heard until he found one in NE. Clearly, we were not the only ones looking up every "0", since there was a massive pileup when I got to him. The pileup was becoming unstable, but fortunately, I make the kill after a few calls, logging the sweep as K0NE (Nebraska) at 0052Z. The new 80m antenna worked great, and the rate on 80m was very good through the end of the contest at 0300Z (10:00 PM). Unfortunately, when the contest ended, we had only 867 Qs for 138,720.   

Photos are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmgalm/sets/72157625360004664/. The pix are courtesy of Dan's Droid.   

In spite of the puny score, we had fun and always enjoy putting W8EDU in a few hundred logs.   

73,  

Jim, W8WTS.