Again I put a long description of what it took to get on for this test at the end.  It ain’t easy to keep all this stuff running!  My heart goes out to Jeff K1TEO a true contest champion who lost one tower to a weather event and it took all the antennas off his other tower when it went down.  Jeff is a real trouper who put up a temporary 6M beam just to get on and give out points!  It wouldn’t be the same if he wasn’t in my log.

The contest started out pretty good.  No Es but guys were there to work on 2M and 6M SSB for the first hour or so.  After an hour that all changed as 6M was quiet on the analog side and everyone seemed to retreat to digital FT8. 2M was wasteland no signals on the scope, no answers to CQs.  6M FT8 was hopping with all the locals I normally work on 2M too and the new freq of 144.174 we have been using for FT8 with great results up to 500 miles in the mornings  was all but abandoned.  It was tedious and disheartening to have to look for locals on 6M, try to remember if they had 2M, work them on FT8 over a minute or so when we could have worked in few seconds on SSB, then pry them loose with 4 or 5 repeated free messages of “W3xxx 144.xxx?”, until they realized they had to reply (God forbid anyone ELSE who was monitoring would ALSO think to QSY there for some action), wait for that reply (sometime all I got was “NO”) and finally work them there.  The free message of 13 characters is WAY limited to try and direct a QSY request.  If you include their call it helps but there is no room for yours.  Call plus QSY 2M gets you back “WHERE?” or “QRG?” instead of just assuming the call freq (what a concept .. a CALL freq!).  

I’m astounded I didn’t see more locals trying to get each other to QSY to make better scores.  You can type in a call and 144.2xx or 144.1x if it’s a 2x3 call and eventually get a response and maybe a QSY but until it catches on it takes a while.  I’m also amazed that locals I can see with +05 or better signals (quite audible and moving the S meter) on FT8 seem to have trouble hearing/decoding me and it can take a minute or three to even get to the QSY part! Guess all that aluminum gain causes multipath and maybe some other stuff that disrupts FT8 on the strong ones.  I’m flabbergasted that many just kept right on CQing on FT8 right through 20 over band openings when the “channel” was totally choked and their receivers couldn’t handle it.  While the band was really open there was a literal sea of green of unanswered CQs while my instantaneous ratemeter was hitting 200 plus! 

All day long Saturday there was very little Es (a few short bubbles) and nobody on 2M not even in the evening like normal.  Some of the stations I work on 4 bands didn’t even bother to set them up (one said  - I didn’t have enough computer screens - ) and QSYed to 2M only with a vague promise of “later’ which almost always means never.  Unless you were a serious multiband station or rover there were few band runs and like January my 2M and above QSOs are WAY down because of this.  This is a multiband VHF contest, not a 6M digital love fest!  And of course there were the stations that refused to go into contest mode and failed open when they got “funny grids”. I realize now that some are using knockoff WSJT programs made for HF that don’t even HAVE contest mode (made in Europe, so why bother).  

2M and above was pretty flat due to all the rain.  Many of the local rovers were washed out by the rain Saturday and Sunday and couldn’t get set up or had to tear down suddenly.  Some just had to abort. The wet and foggy conditions severely inhibited UHF and above contacts for the whole weekend.  One station 90 miles away I normally work on 1296 SSB I couldn’t hear at all even on cw.

Saturday evening the static crashes from lighting kept building.  Around the time MSK144 got effective for meteor scatter and things were picking up was when the thunderstorms came back with a vengeance.  I had to disconnect in the middle of a sked with W5UHF on 2M since the noise went to S9 and the lightning was almost overhead.  The storm was so big it lashed us with a deluge from midnight to 5 AM so at least I got some sleep.  I ended the day with barely over 150 Qs in the log.

Sunday morning was still really noisy as the thunderstorms went slowly east and crapped out prop that way.  It was tough to decode the pings through the crashes but MSK was effective and I worked several on the PJ page.  But my morning sked with a rare grid was a bust and my usual sked with K0AWU failed at 432 due to the WX.  Nobody on 2M SSB except the multis CQing to no replies.  I CQd on 6M msk144 but didn’t get a lot of random replies.  Too many on FT8 already!  I kept sniping at FT8 for mults and trying to get a QSY or three.  It was pretty grim going until around 1400Z when I get a trickle of SSB Es to FL and to TX.  That waxed and waned until 1730 or so when the rate picked up and I started to get some Atlantic FM grids in there too.  I have multiple antennas, one fixed on FL, another on TX and was able to bring the low bay of the array (the only one working) on the FM grids to good advantage. 

At 1800 all hell broke loose and it opened to the FN grids in the NE and I got the 2x11s that way and started a feeding frenzy of 150 Qs that hour! It has not opened so strong to the NE like that here in a very long time during a June contest, 10 years or so!  It ebbed a little during the 1900 hour and I was able to work several multiband stations and rovers on multiple bands and still put over 50 6M Qs in the log.  But the next two hours were also 125 plus hours.  It was thinning out by 2200Z when I had to tear myself away again to work the rovers that did make it out. You really can’t win this contest on 6M alone, at least not against a station that can put a decent effort on 2m and above.

It got really short at one point and I’m sure there had to be some 2M Es somewhere.  6M stayed open but not as strong for the next hour or two but there was little for me to work that I hadn’t already.  I didn’t get any double hop at all to the west coast and there weren’t a lot of Es Qs to the NW, SW or even normal hot spots like Colorado.

Finally by evening stations realized that there was life on 2M SSB and a lot of mults went in the log with band runs and such.  Conditions were still way down but it was more like normal and it was actually hard to work it sometimes getting multiple callers in different directions to run the bands all at once.  They really waited too late for that, should have been doing it the day before when 6 was dead!  The last hour my cell phone and computer screen was going crazy with 2M and above band requests!  Where were they all day and evening on Saturday??!!

I ended up with a really good score, but it could have been a great score had I worked all the stations on 2M that I normally can!  Let’s just hope that this sudden surge on 6M FT8 is just a fad and folks get wise to the true potential of FT8 to ADD mults and such to the score like MSK144 has, rather than just hanging there all day long to try and make the bulk of their Qs.  Please be more flexible instead of making it impossible to pry your face from the computer screen to work a little analog radio that is much more contest score efficient!  This new mode is a TOOL, not a be all and end all!  Maybe more will get hip to the potential of finding more QSOs on 2M when they see a local like me say QSY to 2M on FT8!  And maybe let’s hope that FT8 takes off on 2M too since it holds a lot of promise for some pretty long QSOs.

*****

This spring was really crazy with family health issues that resulted in us spending almost 6 weeks taking care of close relatives in North Carolina but which resolved themselves nicely in the end.  It was really cold here up until mid-May when the weather suddenly turned from winter to summer with record setting 80 and 90 degree days that made outdoor work miserable to perform the usual spring yard chores and clean up the many dead tree blowdowns.  The grass went prompt critical and required mowing twice a week!  I cut it before Dayton Hamvention and it was already going to seed by the time I got home!   So I didn’t even get to the usual spring maintenance stuff on the towers (never mind the broken stuff) until Memorial Day weekend when it was insufferably hot and humid. 

The 6M pair of 11els had high SWR that was traced to a bad N Tee on the power divider where the center fingers on the main coax side were sprung and had it had been arcing internally.  The 3456 problem I thought was a relay was really a bad amplifier stage in the tower mounted preamp so after troubleshooting I had to take it down and just put a straight coax between the relays until I can get it fixed. It actually hears better then I expected with all the coax loss.  It was then that we discovered the Lithium Ion batteries on one of our 440 FM com radios (25 year old Alinco credit card sized low power DJ-C4 HTs) is going bad, luckily on the ground radio where we use a separate monitor radio so N2KMA does not have to have hers with her all the time.  Found a replacement but it has to come from China and won’t be here for a few weeks. It will still take some charge and will work in the charger so we made do.

 The 2304 Superflex had aspirated water between the jacket and shield spiral and shed water into the connector to the LMR600 rotor jumper.  I’m done with using FSJ4 ½ in Superflex on the tower, it’s easier to work with and cheaper than LMR600, but it gives you nothing but grief due to the poor bonding on the outer jacket to copper spiral causing it to aspirate humid air from any jacket imperfection and sublimate out water that rolls right down into the sealed connectors.  I’ve been gradually replacing it.

The squirrels (rats with bushy tails) also had their way with my 160M wire antenna with the apex at 140 feet on the 160 foot 8x7 6M array tower, chewing the rope and causing it to tangle all up in the array elements in the strong spring winds before I noticed and rotated the tower.  That bent several elements as well as breaking one off.  Of course the 6M7 antennas are obsolete now and a new element is a special order. Untangling and straightening was several hours in the hot sun and even 2 bottles of water (one frozen) weren’t enough to keep me from getting dehydrated and having difficulty climbing down.  Usually it gets cooler and less humid up above 50 feet or so but the hot humid layer seemed to be much higher and denser than usual when I was doing all my tower work and I really suffered from it; one day it was even up to 100 feet.   

Thursday and Friday nights before the contest the thunderstorms were huge with torrential rain making it difficult sleeping.  Sometime between Friday morning and evening the SWR on the 8x7 6M array went sky high on any antenna combination and it sounded dead compared to the other antennas.  The controller was putting the right voltages to the right relay outputs but when it was connected to the tower box the readings were way off. With reluctance I climbed the tower Saturday morning before the contest to about 70 feet where the relay antenna combiner and matching box is and had N2KMA switch the controller but none of the relays were pulling in at all (it grounds the antennas by design).  Rather than take any time out of the contest to troubleshoot it I hard wired the bottom pair as the most useful for Es, and the quietest pair in a thunderstorm as these were predicted all weekend.  It proved to be a good decision! 

I’m still struggling with N1MM+ and the Flex 6700 since I use the second VFO for a 2M and above slice/panadapter and can’t automate two radios with multiple transverters to the second VFO. It won’t accept any manual freq input if I attempt to automate the second VF0 with the 2M transverter slice (it rejects anything but a 2M freq). So I have to disconnect it from the CAT COM port on VFO2 and that leaves me with no voice or CW keyer on 2M and above.  Good thing I’m used to doing CW by hand on the UHF and microwaves anyway.  Weirdly with No CAT set to VFO B in SO2R it will still switch between the two slices’ audio on the Flex when you change windows and a Control left or right arrow (or pause key) will also switch the TX (just moving windows or selecting the band on the band map will move the RX but not the TX). 

But sometimes, seemingly at random,  when I move to B VFO and start typing it immediately switches me back to the A VFO and no matter what I do it will not allow me to type a call in the B VFO without doing that switch over.  I can’t make it work again until I close and restart N1MM+.  Since B VFO is where I log all my contacts above 6M manually this is a real PITA!  I can’t figure why it does this, or how to correct it and nobody seems to know.  Sometimes I also find myself in RIT when I didn’t set the RIT.  N1MM+ also got rid of the Buckmaster lookup in the main window so now you don’t have it pop up with exact heading info to the 6 digit grid, very useful with tight antennas especially on the microwaves where the antenna beam width is only a few degrees.  Also there is no way to look up headings to a rover 6 digit grid.   So I have to have Buckmaster running in a separate window as well as a bearing and distance program for rovers.

 It all seemed a lot easier when I just had regular dumb radio, a few switches and a basic logger. To run the bands it was easy to switch transverters, change logger bands with a keyboard click (and still keep the call in the entry box), change VFOs on the radio, adjust the big knob and be on frequency in few seconds.  Now logging and changing bands requires multiple mouse clicks on difficult to see targets and/or keyboard key combinations on different computers along with several other switch and mouse manipulations to get on frequency.  Anymore I find myself doing more computer stuff than radio stuff!

73 de Bob2 K2DRH