I had so much fun last year in the 10 Meter Contest, that I decided to embark on a new project to build a better 10 meter station for this year! This Summer I built up a 70 ft tower and populated it with three homebrew five element yagis. I never got so far as to purchase the rotators, so only the top yagi can rotate, while the lower two were fixed on a tower leg and pointed at Europe. Dennis, W1UE and Art, K1BX had promised to come over and operate for the weekend. Dennis advised that we should try a second antenna and station setup to hunt for multipliers that show up on packet etc. That sounded great, so I built up a 6 element yagi on a 36 ft boom and hung it on a small 30 ft temporary tower. All looked OK, and I borrowed another K3 radio from my brother (K0ZK) to use as the mult hunting station. We tested the new array with the mult station and they seemed to coexist pretty well, but I forgot to check the other ten meter antenna system, a pair of 5 element yagis aimed at South America. Big mistake. As soon as the contest started, the multiplier radio started displaying an interesting message on the front panel screen. HI RFI HI RFI. Hhhmmm? I wonder what that means? Then it started acting funny and displayed other stuff like “TILT” and “AARRGGHH”. Then, the radio died. So much for that idea! Next year I need to spend a little more time thinking these things through. I really worried when K0ZK showed up to see how his radio was doing. He wasn’t too upset, I guess, and the scratch marks and abrasions around my neck are healing pretty nicely now several days later.

The contest started slowly with no propagation on Friday evening. We lasted until 11 PM local working the locals and covered New England and the Mid Atlantic states pretty well. We were up and at 'em at 10:30 UT and waited for Europe to show up on the band. It started off slowly, but soon the band was full and Dennis ran quite a pile on CW for the morning. With our second station idea ruined, we hung around and watched Dennis operate. Dennis left at 2 PM and Art took over. He alternated between CW and SSB for the afternoon. It was nice to have Europe blasting in from about 1100 to 1700 UT. That made up for the poor propagation in the US, as there was very little Es to speak of. The Midwest and Southeast were not in the log in any great numbers. Most contacts were on backscatter.

On Sunday, the European opening was not quite as good, but we spent the time mostly on SSB to pick up all the multipliers we missed by ignoring SSB the first day. It was interesting to work a few long path signals on Sunday. A Chinese SSB station was over S9 around 10 AM local and we snagged an Indonesian station on CW around noontime with our beam towards Europe. We worked only a few JA stations, but I think we nabbed every ham in Australia on ten meters Sunday evening. That was fun too. I never heard so many VK stations at once. My homebrew amplifier worked flawlessly all weekend. No matter how much we ran it, it just purred along. When we shut down at night, we kept the heat and power on in the shack.  The shack is a real shack located in the woods a 1/2 mile walk from my house. I have to make my own electricity up there. The diesel generator ran all night, so that we had no problems in the morning. The temps went below 20 degrees F on Friday and Saturday night. The shack stayed toasty warm. For food, I was the go-fer. I went out and got the pizza and various other stuff. We had a coffee pot and a microwave oven to reheat the cold pizza and leftovers, so we were livin’ large there on the little remote hilltop in Southern Maine. Thanks to Dennis W1UE and Art, K1BX for their operating prowess. I send CW with a paddle like I am wearing boxing gloves. Thank you also to my brother K0ZK for loaning me his K3, and I promise that I will never blow up your radio again. ( or at least for a few months.) 

Our score ended up at about 2.8 million with 2982 QSOs in 315 sections. We were hoping for 3000 QSOs, but the little Es opening at the tail end of the contest moved too far west and we lost propagation to the cloud with 15 minutes to go. It was an exciting finish though.