1997 CQ WW 160 METER DX CONTEST
Call: K3CR
Category: Multioperator
Power: 1500W
QTH: PA
QSOs QSO points States/Provinces Countries Final Score
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1090 3492 56 49 366,660
Operators: KB3AFT, WA3HAE, WA3FET, NW3Z
Jim, WA3FET, and Nathan, NW3Z, have been building a new and large
contest station near to State College for about the past year. They
presently have 3 towers about 185 feet high (all commercial custom brand
new solid-round member construction; very heavy duty), a 100 foot Rohn 45
tower, and a 55 foot heavy duty crankup US Tower. This station is located
on a large farm property owned by Penn State University and is on a small
hilltop in Central PA. There is much land for Beverages and other antennas
of large size when the corn has been cut down. Jim, KB3AFT, has just
joined this threesome and we are all trying to get into contesting very
seriously now and in the future as we start adding all kinds of antennas to
these very substantial towers. They are just crying to have antennas put on
them and we have bought a ton of aluminum to do just that. We have been
using the call K3CR which is the callsign of the Penn State Amateur Radio
Club. We are all associated with Penn State, Jim, WA3FET, being a
Professor in Electrical Engineering and Nathan and Jim are students in E.E.
We wanted to get K3CR back on the contesting map since it has had some
really fine contesters go through it - K3LR, K3UA, WR3G, KN4T, and others.
When Jim, KB3AFT, suggested we do a 160M effort, we decided to convert our
80M dipole that is up 175 feet and broadside to Europe between 2 of the
towers that are separated by 200 feet to a 160M dipole. We simply added on
some extensions at each end of the 80M dipole and ran these slightly past
and down past the towers. We basically have an almost flat 1/2 wave dipole
up 175 feet and broadside to Europe. That is what we used most of the time
for transmitting. We also put up another inverted-V dipole on another
tower at about 100 feet or so that was broadside NW/SE to see how it would
work for comparison. It was better for some stations, but very rarely did
it ever beat the 175 foot high dipole.
We knew we would have to put up some listening antennas as well and we
decided to put up a very long Beverage to Europe that is similar to what is
in ON4UN's book where it starts out at ground level and goes up to 20 feet
in the middle and then slopes back down to ground level at the termination
end. We made this Beverage out of aluminum electric fence wire and put
wooden supports with insulators all along its length to keep the sag down.
We had this antenna ready the day before the contest and it really looked
like it would work. It has so much better S/N than the high transmit
antenna that we felt it would be the thing that really allowed us to work
Europe. This indeed did come true as it pulled signals out that we could
not even hear on our high dipole. We are in a very low noise environment
and the transmit antenna is extremely quiet but that Beverage is amazing.
We made it about 1600 feet long. We terminated it with 12 parallel 4.7K
resistors to lower inductance and provide some higher power rating. At
the feed end we just used a W2FMI type of Balun and RG214 to the shack.
The day of the contest we decided that we would need a west
Beverage as well and began work on this in the early afternoon. What we
didn't know would happen was that all kinds of weather was about to hit our
area. We ended up putting this Beverage up in a full blown blizzard. It
seemed like we were working in Antartica, but as you all know, it is said
that antennas put up in this type of weather seem to always work better for
some reason. We don't have many trees in our farm fields but there are a
few clumps of them here and there. It turned out that the Beverage would
run right
through one of these trees and we got a carpenter saw and cut down the tree
by hand about an hour before the contest in this blizzard as our faces
and were becoming frostbite. We told Jim, KB3AFT, that he better go and
get ready and we hoped we would have the west Beverage ready sometime
after the start of the contest. We did manage to get it going about
45 minutes after the start. It worked as good as the other 1600 foot
NE Beverage and had really great F/B and ability to pull out anything
that was to the west. We had a switching arrangement where we could
switch to the NE or West Beverages and the transmit antenna for receive and
another switchbox for either transmit antenna (175 foot high NE/SW or 100
foot high NW/SE dipoles). Right at the beginning of the contest, we had
S9+10 snow static and even some snow static on the Beverage, but it seemed
to go away just a little before the start (Contest Gods were smiling on us
for our first ever 160M effort). Later that night we got about 6 inches or
more of snow, sleet, ice storm (everything coated with thin coating but
didn't seem to affect things too much), and rain. What a night and a day
of getting ready!!! Anyway, everything worked great the whole weekend and
those Beverages were fantastic. We now want to put up more. We also built
up a complete phased Beverage system that switches directions through DC
voltage going through the coax for 80M and we now want to hurry and get this
going too to compare to the 1600 foot Bevarages. Computer modeling with NEC4
shows that the Beverage Array is pretty hard to beat. Maybe we can get
one of these for 160M next year.
WA3HAE, Keith, and Jim, KB3AFT, did most of the operating and we
all had a great time. We still need to make many improvements for the next
time, especially getting a phone line installed for Internet DX spots. We
had
no spotting since there are no 2M DX cluster machines in State College.
Working multiop without DX spots is not great and we will get this all
fixed for next time.
We would appreciate any reports on how loud we were at any of your
locations. This will help us know what antennas we will put up in the
future. Any comparisons to other signals would be extremely appreciated.
We are interested in stateside and DX reports. Please send any reports to:
jkb1@psu.edu
73 from the crew of K3CR
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