ARRL 160-Meter Contest
Call: VE7FO
Operator(s): VE7FO
Station: VE7FO
Class: M/S HP
QTH: Vancouver
Operating Time (hrs): 6.5
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 100 Sections = 36 Countries = 0 Total Score = 7,200
Club: British Columbia DX Club
Comments:
This wasn't a serious effort. A year or so ago I put up an inverted L for 160
in hopes of picking up some otherwise unavailable band mults in various
contests. Never had much success with it so thought the 160 would be a good
test of it as there are bound to be some stations on. In particular, I wanted
to find out what sort of range I could reasonably expect. Obviously, that's
going to change with conditions, but if I can hear W1 but only work W7, that
will tell me a lot.
The L consists of 30 ft of skinny (9" face) freestanding (but insulated) tower
in the NW corner of my lot and a 120 ft flat top running to a 30 ft mast in the
SW corner of my lot. It's actually about 10% too long but loads OK.
I initially was going to make the skinny tower 50 ft high but realized that if
it got away from me while I was putting it up it could drop on the several kV
power line running down the opposite side of the lane.
The radials are pretty lame. While there are twice as many as would be useful,
they are confined to a rectangular quadrant of about 15 ft East x 25 ft South.
I started about an hour after sunset on Fri, S&P. Didn't hear a lot of stations
but noise level was pretty high. More stations than I liked responded to my
calls with a CQ.
>From time to time I flipped my antenna switch around to the 80 and 40 dipoles
>to
see if they heard any better. They were worse. One time I flipped it past the
dipoles to the R5 20-10m vertical which sits just above my beam at about 45 ft.
Huh?? The station I was listening to went up 2 S Units on the MkV. I tune
around the band. Hey... there are more stations on now. Hmm.... I wonder what
will happen if I try to transmit on the R5. Well, the MkV tuner can load it....
I'll try calling a station. Hey, he came back to me on the first call.
So I spent a bunch of time calling people using the L and, if they didn't come
back, I tried the R5. When I did, they often did come back, even very weak
ones. Sigh... that L was a lot of work to put up. I stopped bothering with it
and just used the R5 for the rest of the contest.
I find it hard to believe that the R5 itself can function well on 160 so I'm
presuming that the feedline was radiating like crazy. The fact that my 2nd
monitor would blank out whenever I was transmitting tends to confirm that
presumption.
So, what sort of range do I have on 160? Best DX was KH6, Mi, Ky and STx.
Didn't even hear W1, 2 or 3. Heard the odd W4 but only worked one. This tells
me that, for some contests, I should pay attention to 160 for mult generation.
Played around with spots some more. They didn't really help me as, at any one
time, I could only hear a small number of stations. I spotted everyone I worked
plus a few more. This didn't hurt my pretty well non-existent rate and may have
helped some folks.
A couple of observations:
I'm new to 160 so maybe the following is a well known phenomenon to everyone. I
noticed that stations would QSB in and out of audibility with a period of maybe
30 seconds to a minute. I found that, for those stations who didn't come back
to me, if I waited until they peaked and then called, sometimes we'd make the
Q.
I heard, and worked, five VE7s I've never heard in any other contest.
I don't know what I'm going to do about the L. Any additional radials will have
to be run outside my lot, like up and down the lane. I'm not too comfortable
with the idea of some youngster picking up the end of a radial while I'm
transmitting. Another possibility is to increase the NW corner tower to 50 ft
and restrain it so that, if it falls over for some reason, it falls on my
property and not on the HV power line. I don't like that one a whole lot,
either.
Still, I now know that I can make Qs within about a 3,000 km radius as long as I
don't use the L. The L loads on 80 and 40, though, and sometimes works better
than the dipoles
Anyway, thanks for the Qs and, even if you didn't work me for VE7, there were at
least 8 others on that I heard.
Merry Xmas de Jim Smith VE7FO
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