Well another SSB sweepstakes has come and gone and I am sitting here on the following Monday pondering was it worth it? I mean I spent countless hours and too much money improving the station. I finished the new desk just last week, that alone was two or three weekends in the woodshop. Then there was the new C31XR (ok new to me) and not to mention the atrocious first generation TicRing  I overhauled and stuck on the tower to turn the new C31XR. Of course you can’t have two C31XRs on a tower without a new stackmatch that ties into the existing K7MI shacklan system. Oh then there was the new Heil PRO7 Headsets. I just have to lean back in my chair and say wow did I spent a lot of time on all this, I mean really WOW. Just adding up the hours boggles me, how did I pull that off with teenagers and 2 year old twins running around?

All this for 1062 contacts compared to 1046 last year… Hummm.

So first I think I have to postulate was my time and energy worth it (or maybe just rationalize it). So let’s dig into that a bit. First the desk: Sitting for days thinking about how to lay it out then hours upon hours cutting, joining, scraping and finishing the wood. Getting a not so natural high off the contact glue for the laminate top and cutting my palm open with the laminate. But wait I love being in my shop building, it’s such a nice break from my real world job and most of the time I was out there I had the twins helping me, so time well spent. On to the antenna projects:  Re-assemble a C31XR with its legion of u-bolts and double nuts, scratch head for days over how to make this old Tic Ring work (and be dependable up on the tower), rebuild parts of the ring, test it time and time again to make sure it works, cross fingers. Install the whole thing on the tower at 60ft, pull new cables through conduit for stack match control, and install stack match and new RF cables. Test it all out… HEY IT WORKS. So most of this time I had the twins trekking around with me “helping” and anytime with the young ins is good time, even with the frequent breaks for a race to the potty. Let’s also be honest any time spent playing with antennas is a freaking good time (though I think the XYL may disagree when I got pretty grouchy while trying to tram up the C31XR).

So looks like most of my time was well spent, as my mother would say, it’s better than running around in the bars chasing wild women!

The only thing I spent money on I wish I had not was the new headsets, but I won’t go there.

So why only 16 more contacts this year with all this effort put forth?  Excellent question!

So the first few hours we were going great guns, averaging about 105 contacts per hour, which for us and that awesome exchange I felt was outstanding.  We had a great system of one at the radio and the other with the twins with a swap out every couple hours and then both of us during nap times. Now granted we are not die hard contesters but we had set a goal of 20% better than last year, but neither of us is too keen on losing our sleep. To be frank about it the new headsets made sitting for longer than an hour at a time less than pleasant and gave both of us headaches. So with sleep on our minds and a headache in our heads we ran until about 8ish local time and decided that was enough for the day, I think we had around 600 in the log by then. I was going to get up around 3 or so and run for a couple hours but that turned out to be a lost cause. At about midnight my older 18 year old daughter calls and says she hit a cow on her way home from work.  She says she is OK but her truck doesn’t run but it isn’t banged up? Well its about 5F deg outside so I jump in my truck and race towards her location (about 18 miles from the house) and when I arrive I find she actually didn’t hit the steer as much as ran over it, breaking her fuel line and a wire harness in the process. Come to find out it was lying dead in the road, someone had hit it earlier and left it in the middle of the road. So a solid black steer on blacktop on a very foggy highway is a terrible combination. Luckily for us they also left behind their license plate when they hit it. Oregon has an open range law so if you hit livestock, guess who gets to pay for it? But I digress, everything will turn out fine there, but by the time we waited for a state trooper (almost an hour), report, tow truck to nearest side road and get home it was nearly 4. So the twins usually are up at 6 at the latest and I knew both of us were going to be dead tired and I would have to run back in around 8 to take care of broken down truck so I figured any hope of getting past even 800 Qs was going to be a lost cause. But somehow we managed to pull off the 1062, quite tired and a little grumpy by the end, but got er done. I would rate it a success.

 So how did the stacked c31’s perform? Well to be honest, they didn’t . Funny story, so I have been playing with them for a month or so since I put it up and all has been well and performance seemed great. The night before the contest I go double check the tic ring is still turning and it is, so I point it due east and go to bed. Next day about an hour before the contest starts I decide to triple check it, and go to move it to about 10 deg, and nothing happens (at least not according to the meter on the controller). I think to myself well that is odd, must be iced up because its only 10F outside. I pay it little mind and say hey, its pointed east that will be perfect for the contest, I will point the top one at about 10 deg and the A4S about 170 Deg and we will be good, won’t even have to rotate an antenna this time around. I did notice after about 2 mins the controller light was still lit like it was trying to move the antenna still, odd. Ok so turn it off and back on and set it back to 90 on the dial and we are good to go. After that I strolled outside to grab something out of the shop and just happened to look up and noticed the bottom C31 is not pointed due west. That’s neat I say to myself but how and why? I look closer and see it wrapped the coax around the tower and was now tight as a fiddle string, wow even more neat. So back inside I go to try and get it to turn back, no go. So for the entire contest the bottom C31 is pointed at 270Deg, and for my location that equates to pretty much nothing.  Ok awesome.  So in the end we did wind up rotating the top C31XR quite a bit and the jury is still out on the Tic Ring, ask me today and I will say I loathe it.

Was it all worth it, heck yeah, who can turn down a chance to hang with your kids and tinker on stuff too?? Add in the best XYL in the world who is super supportive and also a ham, what’s not to like about all that?

 Look forward to the next contest and the next SS.

73

Jack NK7J