This was the second year that I operated QRP from a cabin located at the end of a peninsula on Loon Lake (in EWA land north of Spokane). Setting up was a breeze since there was no snow on the ground. My antenna was a 160m dipole with its feedpoint up 60ft in a pine tree (on top of a 90ft hill surrounded by lake to the north, east, and south.)

I used my Elecraft KX3 along with a PX3 spectral pan display. I’m generally an old-school operator, and this was the first time I’ve used a pan adapter during the 160 meter contest. I’m hooked – using the waterfall display to visually scan the band was a great improvement over my traditional method of operating.

Since I was running QRP, my transmit signal wasn’t big — which meant that 90% of the folks that I could hear couldn’t hear me. Even though the dipole at Loon Lake was physically high (~150 feet above local terrain), on 160 meters this antenna was functionally an NVIS (near-vertical incidence skywave) antenna with not much power emitted at the lower elevation angles. My signal was strong into Oregon and Idaho, but working the East Coast was a real challenge.

Like last year, I could hear really, really well for most of the contest, which was a real pleasure. Band conditions this year were reasonably good with an A index of 8. The catch was that around 5am Saturday morning the local power line noise kicked in and raised the noise floor about 10 dB (rising from -90 to -80dbm). While not the end of the world, this certainly had an impact on my ability to copy some of the weaker signals. And with incoming snow predicted to arrive Saturday evening, I decided to pack up my gear late morning on Saturday and return to town before the private road to my cabin became impassible. Next year I definitely intend to replace the dipole with an inverted L and maybe a separate receive antenna further back in the woods where it will be farther from the power line.