June 2005 Report
June 2005
Contest Story
Everyone asks me how was the contest? I can honestly say I don’t know.
It was a mixed up contest. The Wx was bad but never when I had to get
out of the car. I was very lucky in many ways and things went pretty
well. A surprise Aurora made things interesting. Everything was good
except the contacts.
Friday during testing with N1FGY and KJ1K I discovered that my 1.2ghz
pre-amp was blown so I ran the contest with out one. This resulted in
almost no contacts on that band. Almost all my scheduled contacts on
the microwaves are at least 200 miles long except N2PA.
Friday nights drive to PA (277 miles) had some WX. Of note was a mini
storage that lost its building but left all its contents almost intact.
Once I got to my Mom’s house I attempted to work on a problem I have
with Roverlog. Roverlog is a contest logging program. No its not, it
has become more of a FULL CONTEST utility for rovers and Big Gun’s
alike. I digress. During my debugging session another T-Storm came
through and hit a tree two houses away. It made a mess of the tree. We
had so many close hits the fire department was busy for hours in the
woods. Unfortunately something happened to my 900mhz transverter as
well. It tested fine during the Friday testing so I suspect it died due
to the storms.
I tried a rover to rover QSO at 200 miles with WA2IID before the
contest on Saturday. We were able to make some low band contacts but no
microwave contacts. On Sunday however I made a rover to rover contact
that was almost 250 miles with VE3WCC and they were off the side of my
beam!. I thought that was good when I started hearing 8 and 9 call
signs. All of a sudden everyone disappeared from sideband and were
replaced by fuzzy CW. This is the first time I had heard Aurora.
Unfortunately I do not have a cw key on my low bands radio. I have an
ICOM 706 so I can use the microphone up down keys as a paddle. No,
that’s not easy but I can make a occasional contact with some less than
perfect code. I use it mostly to get low band stations to point their
beams at me and listen.
I was so amazed at the propagation. 5 gigs was MUCH stronger than 2
gigs at two of my sites.FN10 and FN02. It makes no sense. Neither
of these sites has been good for 5gigs ever before. At one of the sites
I like a lot (FN11) signals were all weaker than normal on all bands.
Again no sense. 9:30PM Sat W2SZ 432 op reported to me that he
could not hear me when pointed at me in FN01WA. He apparently had to
point north of that quite a ways to find me. I did not make 3 or 5gigs
from Fn01 and 2 gig was real weak. Saturday before the contest the low
bands were horrible and as soon as the storm passed it got sunny and
cool. Very nice WX and propagation was UP especially on the microwaves.
K8GP was worked for the first time in my Roving on 2 meters. Normally I
only get them on 6meters. I asked them and they were running microwaves
this year so we decided to try to work up the bands thru 5gig. . I went
to 222 and heard nothing? I went to 432 and again heard nothing. This
was only 200 miles so it should have been easy on the low bands. Again,
no sense. Never made it to the microwaves with them.