CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW - 2022
Call: N4HB
Operator(s): K1EEE
Station: N4HB
Class: Multi-Op HP
QTH: VA
Operating Time (hrs): 10
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 575 State/Prov = 49 Countries = 22 Total Score = 104,299
Club:
Comments:
It was a difficult contest for us on the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia! It started
out okay, but went downhill quickly due to a Nor Eastern blizzard that formed
off the coast and hit us Friday night. About four hours into the contest we
noticed the SWR beginning to creep up on the transmit antenna, which is an
inverted “L”. That caused us to continually have to retune the antenna, but
was getting worse by the minute. We also started to see much more noise on the
Hi-Z, 3-element receive antennas. Those antennas are very low noise to begin
with, and are about 10 dB quieter than my DX Engineering “magnetic loop”,
which is also a fairly quiet antenna. By 0300 UTC, the “L” antenna was
totally unusable, causing havoc with the Flex TGXL turner, as well as the Flex
PGXL amplifier. And, the noise hits on the receive antennas had increased to as
much as 30 dB above the normal noise floor level. We shut down the operation
before any damage was done to the equipment; and, we’re only five hours into
the contest. Not good!
When the storm cleared the next morning, I surveyed the problem and found all of
the antennas where totally encapsulated in ice and several inches of snow. I
cleared each one of the feed points, and let the Sun do the rest throughout the
day. I checked the equipment in the afternoon and it all worked normally. We
were back on the air!
The operation was back on, but now the problem wasn’t the ice and snow from
Friday night. The band conditions had drastically changed on Saturday! It became
a grind to a run and work stations to our West and Southwest. The Northern East
Coast stations were in the middle of a major storm that had hit us the night
before. They got it a lot worse than we did, and many were without power in
sub-freezing temperatures. We worked about everything we could hear, but there
was a real lack of stations on the band from my location that we would normally
have put in the log. I was struggling to hear Europe and only worked one on
Saturday night, where I had worked about 18 the night before, during the short
period we were on the air. The band seemed to be quiet enough, but the
conditions had really deteriorated! We basically shut the operation down around
0230 UTC, due to so few stations that we hadn’t already put in the log. I came
back a few hours later and put another 50 or so in, but it was ruff! Our final
count was down about 400 Qs, a lot of States/Prov., that are normally worked,
and about 15 DX countries from 2021. Maybe next year!
Equipment:
Flex 6600M transceiver
Flex PGXL amplifier
Flex TGXL auto tuner
Antennas:
Inverted “L’ for transmit
Hi-Z, 3-element steerable receive array
DX Engineering, Magnetic Looper
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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