IARU HF World Championship
Call: EA5KV
Operator(s): EA5KV, EA5GS, EA5ON, EC5KXA
Station: EA5ELT
Class: M/S HP
QTH: Torrent
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Zones HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
160: 24 7 22
80: 45 24 30
40: 228 94 51
20: 26 429 50
15: 127 416 45
10: 12 590 36
-------------------------------------
Total: 462 1560 234 0 Total Score = 1,437,472
Club:
Comments:
After our "success" in the ARRL 10m in December we decided the 4 ops (EA5KV,
EA5GS, EC5KXA and your scribe EA5ON) make a decent enough m/s team and so
decided to go for IARU. Victor and myself were on the HQ team for the last two
years so was nice to get on and do something a bit different.
The station at EA5ELT has undergone quite a transformation in the last couple
of years and for IARU we had a few new things on the go: we installed a new 80m
delta loop with open wire feeder, we shunt fed the tower for 160, and prepared a
K9AY loop for top band and 80. The circumstances there are that the club
premises are at an old police repeater station right at the top of a big hill
in the town of Torrent. We have a small perimeter with a couple of towers, but
are able to install temporary antennas in the forest and car park which are
north and south of the property. In this case, means that most of the radials
for the tower have to be put down and taken up every time. We did leave a fair
number on the forest side, in the undergrowth, but in less than a week 3 of
them had already been stolen, so can't even contemplate leaving a spiderpole
unattended!
Saturday when I arrived late afternoon, we already had a decent score on 10 and
15 so I got to the pile on 20 phone and made a pretty decent run until we
decided that grey line was approaching so time to connect the loops and the
tower. David and Jose had just finished the switch box with a relay to make
sure all the RF was properly routed but somewhere along the line we made a
mistake and the Acom all of a sudden refused to work. We spent what seemed an
eternity trying to sort it out, in the end decided to disconnect everything and
leave it as it was in order to see if the Acom would fire back up again. It did.
So, we made our top band Qs using the tower as TRX antenna, a shame since the
loop did show some useful nulls. Then, when we tried to get back on 20 to run
to the states, we found that the Explorer 14 was showing extremely high SWR.
This was not a surprise, it had already been doing this on 10 intermittently,
and we had already made a new balun just in case. Unfortunately none of us had
a head torch so tower climbing at night was not an option. Thankfully the loop
tuned up nicely on 40 and we were able to continue through the night on 40 and
80, but conditions were not great. Phone was a real struggle but thankfully CW
a bit easier and David was able to do a fair job on 40. The shame was that the
loop would not work at all on 20 and we missed a huge potential there all
night.
Come daybreak Jose and myself were in a quandary as to whether we should
cannibalise the K9AY and put up a 20m vertical, or wake Dave and send him up
the tower (why we didn't do it ourselves is another story). So we turfed Dave
out of his hammock, gave him some breakfast, and sent him up. Once the balun
was changed, checked and 10 and 15 were working fine again but we had a trap on
the 20m driver sparking over on HP. So, Jose and I went and cannibalised the
loop. By that time though Victor was up and running on 10 and there we stayed
until a couple of hours before finishing, when we moved to 15.
Taking everything into consideration (SFI 67 and a high K index) and our long
down time, more than happy with the result. Most important, we had a great
time, all learnt something, and looking forward to the next one. My thanks to
all the team, to Victor for the planning and organisation, Dave for the
countless hours of antenna work, and Jose for all the IT work, not to mention
his FT2000, hi!
Rig: FT2000
Amp: Acom 1000
Ants: Explorer 14 with 40m kit, 80m bazooka, 80m delta loop, shunt fed 22m
tower, K9AY loops, 20m half wave vertical
73 de EA5KV team
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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