Florida QSO Party - 2023
Call: AD4ES
Operator(s): AD4ES KE4YGT N1ZZ W4SO
Station: AD4ES
Class: M/M MobileCW LP
QTH: ROVER
Operating Time (hrs): 20
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs
--------------------
40: 179 0
20: 1995 0
15: 702 0
10: 37 0
--------------------
Total: 2913 0 CW Mults = 67 Ph Mults = 0 Total Score = 780,684
Club: Florida Contest Group
Comments:
Radios: Icom 7600 and Icom 7100.
Antennas: HAM STICKS all bands and Hustler for 10 meters.
We had a great time this year and somehow avoided the storms. 20 meters was our
money band and Scott was our money band operator! He averaged 100 QSO’s per
hour for the entire 20 hours. Simply put, Scott is a QSO machine. The geriatric
multiband station with Chuck and Dan at the key mustered some 900+ QSO’s.
Chuck and Mike shared driving duties with the bulk of the driving performed by
Mike. We used a 2009 version of Streets and Trips for navigation. No surprise,
some roads and highways have been rerouted and changed. We need a better
solution for next year. We think that 10m was open but very few were listening.
15m was active but at times much slower than we would have liked. 40m Saturday
night was good but was a little anemic on Sunday morning. Which brings me to a
question. Why do we start at 8:00am on Sunday? Starting at 9:00am or 10:00am
makes much more sense. It is too early for western states and often only 1 band
is open for an appreciable time on Sunday morning. Furthermore, mobiles stop at
10:00pm Saturday night, check in to a hotel, get settled and need to get up
early to be on the road by 8:00am. Furthermore, it is not uncommon that you
might not want to start operating in the county you are in, so you need to
travel before 8:00am and get to the desired starting point. As a mobile I would
much rather see a Sunday from 9:00am to 7:00pm.
This year we had 20m and 10m HAM STICK antennas for the station that was
primarily planned for 20 meters. The station intended for multi-band use had HAM
STICKS for 40m & 15m and a Hustler with a short mast for 10m. Most of our
QSO’s on the multi-band station were on 15m. We used a Hustler VP-1 triangular
mount and a Hustler SSM-3 Spring combination and mounted our antennas to the
VP-1 which is a bent triangular mount that can hold up to 3 antennas each having
a 3/8” stud and nut. The FQP van has long since had 3/8” extra heavy-duty
mounts on the roof that have performed well throughout the years. The antennas
performed extremely well, and we plan on continuing with this configuration in
the future. For interstation interference we had tuned stubs that required
manually rotating a coax “Antenna” switch along with Dunestar automatic
bandpass filters for all bands. Some band combinations still forced use to run
reduced power to minimize interference….something we will work on for next
year. But even running 50 watts the QSO’s still kept coming.
Because the VP-1 mounts have the antennas at an angle the overall height of the
antennas is lower than last year’s totally vertical antennas that had to be
swapped out when we changed bands. The thumping of the antennas on low hanging
telephone lines and tree branches was almost non-existent this year.
We overdosed on snacks and somehow our multi-generational group of four managed
to have pit stops that were fairly in sync with our biological needs.
Many many thanks to Chuck, NO5W, for his software “CQ/x” that works so great
for mobile route planning and operation. This software provides automatic
county name changes as we travel from county to county. When we are in Brevard
County our call was set automatically to “AD4ES/BRE”. When we enter Volusia
county our call is automatically changed to “AD4ES/VOL” and so on throughout
our trip. This feature makes operation as well as logging sooooo easy. After
day 1 I emailed Chuck a question about the function key assignments. I received
an answer and after some stumbling, I was able to have the “F” keys function
as desired on Sunday. This year we took the extra CQ/x steps so that each
operator knew when the next county crossing would occur in terms of how many
miles and how many minutes to the next county crossing. Cool stuff!!
Our laptops are out of warranty as they are circa 2009 so the plan is to replace
them next year. Other than that, and working on interstation interference we
look forward to topping 3000 QSO’s next year and running pileups on 10m, 15m,
and 20m.
Thanks everyone for the QSO's.
73
Chuck, Mike, Dan, Scott
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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