This is a rather long rambling so if you don’t want to read about all the broken stuff and my struggles to keep competitive skip down to the contest information.   The winter was cold and so was the spring, but it was dry and windy. Then came the rain. For the past several weeks it’s been rain and overcast, and if it’s not raining then the saturated ground ensures the humidity is oppressive. Summer arrived with temperature swings from unseasonably cold to unseasonably hot and the wind blows hard when it’s not raining. Of course about two weeks before the contest suddenly stuff started breaking and there was tower work and shack work to do to fix stuff before the contest. 

The rotor loops for the rotating joint at 80 feet that I fixed before the September test all came undone and a few got dinged again. The control cable for the 1296 preamp broke. The 2304 coax had been dead for the January contest when it suddenly thawed then froze hard again and the preamp noise didn’t come back, indicating a moisture problem. I got a short window from the rain on a cold 50 degree day late in May and was able to fix the rotor loops and the control lines but there was no water in the usual places up at the preamp box or the coax connector to connector splice before the rotation loop on 2304. Then it rained for several days again. 

  One day 222 RX suddenly sounded dead for no particular reason I could figure but I could still hear the preamp and the beacons. I went back up on a 90 degree humid day and the 222 FSJ4 superflex had developed the water aspiration problem between the jacket and the copper spiral and filled the upper rotator loop connector with water. I cut a drain it like I’d done for 3456 (which is still working fine BTW) and dried it all out but it was still down. Further checks proved the coax was good now, but apparently since I power the mast mount preamp through the coax the wet connectors had taken out the second amp stage. Luckily I can still hear well and can compensate for the lost gain with the preamp in the TE systems brick which I never ordinarily use. A project for another day so I could concentrate on 2304. 

  I found water in the FSJ4 connector to the 1-5/8” hardline for 2304 and it had pooled inside 1-5/8 connector. There was also condensation inside the 1-5/8 connector body despite all being sealed with nuclear grade heat shrink. I suspected the FSJ4 had gotten water into the insulation from the preamp box up top or under the jacket but when I cut it back it was totally clean and dry and tested good. I’d already seen it was good at the top! And there was no way water could have migrated through the 1-5/8 female 7/16 DIN connector to get inside the connector body since it is sealed and does not have a pin going through it! And if it didn’t come in from the top and migrate down the FSJ4, then where did it come from in a totally sealed heat-shrinked connection? 

  2304 still didn’t test right so I also took apart the heat-shrinked connection at the bottom where it goes to the FSJ4 jumper into the shack. Full of water too! This end has a male DIN on the 1-5/8 with a screw in pin that goes through it and when I unscrewed the pin from the center conductor water literally poured out of it. Again, where did it come from? Someone suggested that the moist air was trapped when I terminated it and it condensed down but it was at least an ounce by my estimate and the run is only about 100 feet so that seems excessive. The insulation stayed dry and read over 100 megohms (the limit of my meter) and the copper shield was dry and shiny as was the outside of the center conductor. The inside was another matter, and showed quite a bit of oxidation. The weather forecast said no rain for the next two days so I left it open to dry out. Big mistake! The next day it came a Thunderstorm monsoon with over 2” of rain that totally flooded the area behind the house and immersed the end in water before I could pick it up and cover it. It rained all day and night into the next day. 

  This was Friday before the contest already and as I was testing with K0TPP the next day and waiting for the rain to stop I noticed that the 2M SWR was out the roof! Up the tower again when it finally cleared the afternoon and found that while the connection itself was dry, the body of the 7/8ths hardline connector was full of water! This one made sense at least as the heat shrink had cracked where it rubbed against the tower, let water into the connector body and it carbon arced across the 7/8 insulation. Cut it back and it looked and tested good so put another connector on and was good to go, but it cost me time with the 2304 1-5/8. It was misty all afternoon and only sealed up temporarily with tape so that has to be revisited again. 

  That connection was a nightmare to redo in the still wet backyard. I cut back about a foot to be sure water hadn’t migrated into the insulation. The piece I cut off tested over 100 meg so it probably wasn’t necessary. But the center to shield on the hardline itself was reading a few megohms now, probably due to condensation in the top connector or rain incursion (I had not shrunk it down, just wrapped and taped it up since I was still troubleshooting). I had to use a paste of Bar Keepers Friend to remove the oxidation inside the center conductor where the pin screws in. I didn’t have any more DIN 1-5/8 or FSJ4 connectors so I had to clean up and save the old ones. The female FSJ4 connector body parts wanted to cross thread so I had to chase that to get it to work. Finally got it all together and success! I could hear my preamp again, but the insulation readings say it’s still not right. It has to be reopened on a dry day again. If we can ever get any.          

  There was no mercy from other equipment either. My newest DEMI 6M transverter decided to lose sensitivity and frequency drift. A trip back to DEMI and it arrived back again the day of the contest. Luckily the older one still works fine (although is not quite as crunch proof – but as it turned out that didn’t matter much). The display on my IF radio became intermittent, but I had another basket case for parts so that was easy to take care of. The 902/3 mast mount preamp never has been right since it was fixed last time and now it seems to be oscillating, it hears better without it! Many other little things had to be patched or fixed; it just never ends. I heard that this contesting stuff is supposed to be fun. Seems to be a struggle anymore in more ways than one. 

    The June Contest 

  The contest itself was a slugfest. Due to the rain there was no real tropo enhancement to speak of until maybe Sunday night when signals seemed to be up a bit on 2M and above. It pretty much rained all day both days until Sunday evening and at times the precip static was horrendous. Lucky I now have low antenna options on 6 and 2 so I could keep going. A line of thunderstorms set up late Saturday afternoon and the line marched right over my house for 7 straight hours until well into the night. 

  Es on 6M was the worst I’ve ever seen during a June contest, in keeping with an entire season that has really been well below average so far. Usually we can get a least an hour or two of good rates on 6M but not at all this year. It opened briefly to the the SW and TX (of course) late afternoon Saturday but that was spotty and consisted of fairly short duration bubbles. Before it did I actually had a 60 QSO hour this year of just about all local stations and rovers, probably bored by the lack of 6M. Some Es lasted well into the night but was very limited for us in the Midwest. I had a pretty good total going into WSJT time Saturday night.

  The new rules make things a lot different but I’m not sure if they helped me or distracted me more from trying to find stuff to work on my own. The DX clusters really weren’t that much help even by showing where the prop was on 6M since I usually find it anyway when I QSY someone there. It’s also somewhat discouraging to see prop in other places causing you to chase what you can’t quite get to. My 60 hour came the old fashioned way, calling CQ, QSYing the bands and being aware of the trends. The rovers were a bit easier to track since they could post their locations on various sites (one set up for that locally by W0UC) and it was nice to be able to call them on the cell phone and set things up to look my way if I didn’t find them yet. 

  I was able to set up a few tropo and scatter Qs on ON4KST when things got really slow. Ping Jockey was a good source of information for Ms stuff. I’d set up fewer WSJT skeds in advance and that turned out to be a good strategy since there was plenty being offered on PJ, but by 2AM even that had dried up. When I went to bed I left the radio on 50260 running with WSJT monitoring FSK441 and saw very little in the way of random CQs overnight like I usually do. Got quite a few takers on PJ late Sunday morning into the afternoon that added to my grid total. All in all it’s hard to say how many Qs the new rules added to my score, but my feeling is it was probably less than 30. However most of those did help the grid total too. Hopefully more will comment on this. 

  Sunday was slow all day. The rain kept any enhancement down in the morning and it was a slow slog all day until 6M Es finally showed some life in the evening, right about the time the locals out to 500 miles get on again and tropo picked up. It was so slow I even invested about 20 minutes doing a Hail Mary Ms sked with C6ATA at 1400 miles to no avail. Calling CQ on 6M I was getting more local callers than on Es since it really was not into my area for the most part except for the occasional spotlight bubbles (which do add to the grid total). The big antennas can take advantage of fringe prop that I was able to tap into, but for the most part while both coasts were having a good time with Es, we were in a black hole. 

 All in all I did my best and am not at all disappointed in the score considering conditions. The new rules change a few strategies and makes a few things easier its but it still depends on the resources available and those are obviously still in development. They didn’t affect me in a huge way, but I can see it being good for the VHF community in general if more folks can get on and have more fun with it.

73 de Bob2 K2DRH