ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: VE3XD/W4
Operator(s): VE3XD
Station: VE3XD
Class: SOAB LP
QTH: FL
Operating Time (hrs): 8.5
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 0 0
80: 0 0
40: 39 27
20: 61 38
15: 81 39
10: 30 19
-------------------
Total: 211 123 Total Score = 77,859
Club: Contest Club Ontario
Comments:
This turned out to be a good news - bad news contest.
Good news - 40m was open Friday evening and I was able to work 25 countries from
the mobile station. Never had anything close to this before in so short a time
working mobile (stationary) with a hamstick antenna.
Bad news - Early Saturday morning the serial cw interface became intermittent
and then stopped working altogether.
Good news - Brought out the spare parallel cw interface which also let me use
rig control with a separate cable on the serial port.
Bad news - RF was getting into the interface and I could not put out any
power.
Good news - Wrapped the cable around a toroid and was able to get out 30 watts
on 10m, 50 on 15m and 70 on 20m.
Bad news - This setup worked okay until Sunday morning when after an hour on 20m
I switched to 15 and the RF problem resurfaced. Tried 10m because much of the
action was moving there and I had not made many contacts on 10. This time there
was high swr on the 10m antenna. After trying different lengths of whips and
different coax nothing helped. Went back to 15 but again could not use any
power.
Decided to call it a day, packed up the equipment and went home. Hopefully the
swr problem will be solved for the SSB version of the contest. See you all
then.
73,
Don VE3XD/W4
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