K7SV VIRGINIA SECTION LOW POWER UNASSISTED
816 Q's X 58 sections + 40 countries = 217,168 pts.
Drake C-Line - IC735 - 40 meters double extended zepp with 65 feet of
vertical feeders fed as top loaded vertical and 300 ft beverages to south
and northeast.
K1HTV beat me in the local low power category last year, so I was
determined to do better this year. I had a ball. Almost doubled my score
from last year, worked WAS on top band in one weekend, and finally
worked my first JA on top band!
My strategy based on watching the band and WWV prop reports for the week
prior to the contest, was to run as much as possible Fri night unless Eur
appeared to be loud. The A index dropped to six by Friday and hit 4
Saturday. Add a high atmospheric noise level to fairly poor propagation
Friday night, and my strategy appeared to be correct. Then with pretty
darn good conditions Saturday night, I was pretty comfortable spending
time collecting mults.
High points: Working JA of course. Finding KL7Y (ok, really finding a
pile up calling KL7Y) calling cq. At least Dan presented a stable target!
Initially it reminded me of a new accronym I ran across the day before.
That accronym is MUSH, which stands for multi user shared hallucination.
I could tell he was there, but that was about all. In short order he
became perfectly copyable and yours truly made hay while the sun was
shining. Heard a New Englander call him four times with four responses,
but the 1 disappeared. It was great to have three Nevada stations show up
Sat night after hearing none on Friday. Worked lots of Eur with great
sigs. There are still a few alligators on the continent.
Low points: I wasn't going to mention the call, but someone else had a
similar problem with the same individual, so I will. KD9SV sat down
within a hundred hz or so of me. I politely told him to go away. No
response. I zero beat and politely asked him to go away. He continued
calling cq without indicating that he even heard me. So I remained zero
beat and continued calling cq. He went away. At our sunrise VK4YB was
calling cq just inside the low end of the window. A Wery Big gun in the
black hole fired up just out of the low end of the window and Zapped the
VK while calling cq PAC! (Managed to work him through the rf screen anyway).
I think most of the guys did a great job staying clear of the window.
It's ironic that I have done my share of complaining about window
encroachment in the past, but with conditions being what they were over
the weekend and with the amount of activity, I'm not sure how much the
window
really helped. I'm not complaining about his presence because he was dx
after all, but the big signal from VP9AD caused the same problems on the
East Coast that someone in the Carolina's would. Ham radio's a hobby and
in contesting, there ain't no Nirvana! Did a lot of you find the window
to be helpful? I found it easier to work Eur outside of the window than
in.
Finally I have had such good luck with a fairly simple wire antenna, I'm
curious as to why it does work so well. I've tried matching my tower, and
two different types of inverted L's, but none can touch the 40 meter dubl
extended zepp fed as a top loaded vertical. Is there anyone out there
who hasn't had their fill of playing with modeling software that would
like to plug my configurion in and run it?
With few exceptions, I found that even under contest conditions 160 is
still the gentlemans band. Thanks to one and all for a wonderful weekend.
Oh, I almost forgot. I found two uses for the second radio in this test.
You may not be able to use this with high power, but it sure worked
well with low. While cqing I had a beverage on the 735 and ran around
finding stations I hadn't worked. It was a bit awkward because I had to
switch in the transmit antenna and change keying from one rig to the
other, but it really paid off with new mults. Some of the time I had
the 735 with beverage in one ear and the C-Line in the other. I kept
switching between the two bevs. It frequently happened that someone
called that I could only hear on any one of the three antennas.
73 de Larry
K7SV in VA - lschim@mailstorm.dot.gov
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