ARRL January VHF Contest - 2022
Call: N8RA
Operator(s): N8RA
Station: N8RA
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: FN31TL
Operating Time (hrs): 11
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 141 22
2: 118 31
222: 14 10
432: 7 2
903:
1.2:
2.3:
3.4:
5.7:
10G:
24G:
-------------------
Total: 280 65 Total Score = 19,565
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
A semi-serious effort from here in Connecticut.
The Saturday afternoon start of the contest was iffy; initial signal reports
with some antennas were not good. Was there still some ice on them? But after a
while everything was humming along fine and the first two hours doing
alternating CQs on 6 and 2 yielded a nice bunch of SSB contacts, chats, and
moving stations thru the higher bands. Conditions seemed OK on 2M and only fair
on 6M. No 6M E or F skip Qs were made, but on 6M I did see some very short FT8
decodes including one of a DH prefix station calling a GM station, or did I just
imagine that one? After a break, I set up shop on FT8 for a while and came back
again after dinner and then quit for the night with 158 contacts in the log.
On Sunday, I was in and out of the shack a lot, including a stint ushering at
our local church. Late Sunday afternoon I had FT8 windows running on both 6 and
2 simultaneously, and the combined rate was close to 40/hour. (Some may
sarcastically say “wow”…hi, but it sure is fun to deal with.) An
occasional switch to SSB netted more of those contacts here and there.
2M tropo down the coast and to the west was better than Saturday with many new
grids worked. Even 6M got into the act with a lot of new mults.
On the higher bands, it was satisfying to have the 222 Mhz station going again,
the farthest grid worked there was FN03, about 300 miles away. This band has
real potential but suffers from low activity. I had planned to use the new WSJT
free text feature to move stations there, but I was too busy keeping up with the
stream of answers to check my call history file to see who had that capability.
With a 3 deg outside temperature, the basement radio cave had a cold floor but a
new pair of Baffin booties from a son made that no problem.
Murphy also had a fun time playing with me.
Before the contest, a breaker was tripping on one shack power feed- found it was
a bad AC line filter on the 2M amp.
Also, the 222MHz transceiver was not working right- found the crystal oven
oscillator had a flaky output and realignment fixed that.
Running a WSJT window loaded from N1MM+ on my older secondary computer produced
an audio tune signal that had a periodic hiccup. Worked on that a lot but
nothing helped. From my newer computer the tune signal was steady, but not on
this older one. Found that starting WSJT-X by itself worked fine producing a
pure and steady tune tone. I decided to use it that way and thought I’d have
to log those contacts manually into the logger. But having a networked logger
running on that computer with it set for “no radio” it did automatically
receive and log the WSJT-X QSOs made there. Thank you! I just did not have the
logger color coding.
Right near the start of the contest, my Heil boom mic became intermittent and I
had to switch to a desk mic on a gooseneck which is a bit clumsy. A Sony 7506
Christmas present will cure that when I get around to adding a ModMic.
During the contest, discovered that the realignment of the 222 MHz transverter
xtal oscillator shifted it off frequency by 5 kHz. The clue was stations moved
to 222 were 5KHz high. Aha, so that’s why I could not hear the regular beacons
earlier that week.
Saturday, just before stopping for the night, the 6M amp sounded a zap and went
dead. It looked like its internal circuit breakers had tripped so maybe this
something serious. Sunday morning those breakers reset just fine. I think it was
that they got too hot because of the wattmeter I had positioned over them
blocking some cabinet vent holes-oops.
There was a line noise to the SW on 6M that came and went. Will need to work on
that before next time.
On Sunday, the 432 MHz setup using an FT897 stopped producing RF on 432, and I
could not find anything obviously wrong so that band was off the air.
But all-in-all a lot of fun playing with my toys.
73,
Chet, N8RA
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