CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW - 2020
Call: AB7E
Operator(s): AB7E
Station: AB7E
Class: SOSB10 HP
QTH: Arizona
Operating Time (hrs): 0.8
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160:
80:
40:
20:
15:
10: 31 9 13
------------------------------
Total: 31 9 13 Total Score = 1,980
Club: Arizona Outlaws Contest Club
Comments:
I had several other things to do so my plan for the weekend was simply to
operate 10m as time and the band allowed. Propagation was considerably worse
than it had been on 10m just a few days earlier, so Saturday morning I just did
some search and pounce for the few South American stations I heard.
Just as I started to hear a couple of African stations the guy who owns the ISP
that uses my tower arrived to change out some gear (we had previously scheduled
his visit) and he mentioned that he thought maybe his 12v DC power supply was
going bad because the gear on the tower had been occasionally
"jumping". He also though maybe his big router might have a problem.
He was in the process of having his secretary order some new gear when I asked
him how long and how often he had noticed the problem. The timing matched with
the times I had operated 10m .... either in the days before the contest when I
was testing my amp or during the contest. So I went back in the house to key
the rig, and sure enough 10m (and only 10m) messed with his gear. He changed
out an older cable from the router to one of the radios on the tower because he
suspected that the shield on it was poor, but that didn't fix it.
He gets his power from my house, but his AC to DC power supply is near the house
and he runs the 12 VDC from there to the tower via almost 200 feet of #10 UF
cable that just lays on the ground. I've told him that he needs to upgrade
that, and he actually plans to convert to solar panels out near the tower, but
so far he hasn't done so. I had him open up his equipment box out at the tower
so I could see his DC feed to his router, and it doesn't have any filtering on
it except for whatever might be inside the router ... which I suspect is none.
So I stayed off 10m and didn't feel like jumping on to any other band at that
point either since I had those other projects to get done anyway. I'm pretty
sure that the 10m RF is simply getting picked up by the long unfiltered DC run,
and I suspect that 28 MHz just happens to be problematic for his gear. There are
about 240 households that get their internet off my tower, so the decision not
to operate was pretty easy.
I told him we needed to get this fixed before the ARRL 10m Contest the weekend
of Dec 12/13, so he is coming back out and I'll try to add some filtering from
my junk box (shunt capacitors and maybe some ferrite cores) to his DC feed.
Hopefully that works.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
______________________________________________
3830 mailing list
3830@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/3830
|